The Survivor Literary Analysis

Throughout history stories of the hero, tragic and flawed, have been told verbally, in writing and, most recently, through film and other forms of electronic media. The hero is revered and respected, someone that children are taught to look up to and aspire to be. We are conditioned to believe that to be a hero is to endure the most challenging of circumstances and to still come out on top; taught that to be righteous and victorious in your willing participation as you seek to accomplish a goal is of the highest esteem. In Terrence Des Pres’ The Survivor, Des Pres proves that to be a hero is simple, but to be a survivor, to not only endure and outlast incomparable circumstance but to keep the spirit alive and maintain some semblance of normalcy …show more content…
Within the first section of The Survivor, Des Pres poignantly displays the glaring differences between a hero and a survivor. For the hero, success is measured as their ability to defeat their antagonist, to complete their task. For the survivor, success is measured as their ability to not only continue to exist physically, but to maintain their humanity in the process, “to keep a living soul in a living body” (Des Pres, 1976, p. 7.) Des Pres utilizes works of fiction to show that heroes are individuals that choose to go through extreme circumstances, coming out changed, growing to incorporate their struggle into their daily life. Survivors, however, are individuals that manage to incorporate their daily life into their struggles, fighting to hold onto themselves, to not let the tragedy around them define their personhood, while ultimately being molded by their circumstance, so that they may reckon with their new life. Survivors have been isolated from their former lives, forced to “adjust their sense of reality to conditions drastically different from those of that other world,” (Des Pres, 1976, p. 184) the world of which they have been stolen from, that they live beside but no longer belong to. To survive they had to evolve beyond some of the most basic human …show more content…
The purpose was quite clear: to disclose the humiliation and dehumanization felt at the hands of their tormentors, and to ensure that similar occurrences will never happen again. Des Pres shows that the need to build moral and empathetic compasses within those that remained unscathed by the war was paramount to building the human conscience as “the individual ‘voice’ we usually take it for” (Des Pres, 1976, p. 47.) By relaying these experiences, not only are survivors provided a platform with which they can express the true horrors they have experienced and the necessity to learn from these atrocities, but they are also provided a means of processing the level of torture they have