Survival And Isolation In Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon

In Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon, the theme is survival and isolation because can you imagine one’s town being cut off from the rest of the world? In Alas Babylon, the town of Fort Repose is isolated from the rest of the world and they have to learn to survive after a nuclear weapon hits. People have to change who they are because if they do not change, survival is not possible. A good way of putting the situation is, “So the struggle was not against a human enemy, or for victory. The struggle, for those who survived The Day, was to survive the next” (Frank 123). Florence’s fish tank is a good metaphor to the way things happened in Fort Repose. In the fish tank, the exotic fish died because the aquarium is not heated but, the common guppy and the tough catfish survives. The people who do not adapt are the ones who do not survive after The Day, which is when the nuclear weapon went off and things changed for good. Several died on The Day because of heart attacks and also from being physically unfit. Edgar Quisenberry was a banker who died, for he could not imagine not being a banker and money being worthless, so he killed himself. Randy Bragg is an example of someone who adapted to their surroundings and changed who he was to survive after The Day. He turned …show more content…
Suzanne Robin says in her article Can We Live Without Salt Consumption, “Sodium, one of the ingredients in table salt, helps control the balance between fluid in the cells and fluid outside the cells in your body” (Robin 1). Randy knows he has to fix this problem, so he looks into the log of Lieutenant Randolph Rowzee Peyton to find out where to find some salt. He finds out there is salt at the Blue Crab Pool up the Timucuan. Thirteen men, all in five boats, traveled to the Pool and came back with fifty pounds of salt. They could have just said there was no more salt and died, but they used their resources and