theme of survival essay

Survival and Resilience: Themes in the Grapes of Wrath

This essay about John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Endurance” explores the themes of survival and resilience amidst the backdrop of the Great Depression. Through the plight of the Joad family, the narrative illustrates the unyielding human spirit in the face of adversity. From the harsh landscapes of Oklahoma to the promise of California, the Joads encounter a world marked by economic turmoil and exploitation. Despite the challenges they face, they find strength in solidarity with their fellow travelers, forging bonds of resilience amidst collective struggle. Steinbeck’s poignant commentary exposes the human cost of unchecked capitalism and social injustice, while also celebrating the enduring power of hope and determination. Ultimately, “The Grapes of Endurance” serves as a timeless reminder of the resilience inherent within each individual, urging readers to find strength in community and embrace the possibility of a better tomorrow.

How it works

In John Steinbeck’s monumental masterpiece, “The Grapes of Endurance,” the themes of survival and resilience unfurl like tendrils of hope amidst the dust-laden winds of the Great Depression. Embarking on a journey fraught with peril and uncertainty, the Joad family becomes emblematic of the human spirit’s unyielding resilience in the face of overwhelming adversity. Within the tapestry of Steinbeck’s prose, survival transcends mere physical existence, morphing into a testament of inner fortitude and unwavering determination.

From the parched fields of Oklahoma to the promise-laden horizon of California, the Joads navigate a landscape scarred by economic turmoil and ecological devastation.

Driven from their ancestral home by the merciless grip of poverty, they embark on a odyssey marked by hardship and heartache. Yet, amidst the desolation, seeds of resilience take root, sprouting tendrils of hope that refuse to be snuffed out by the harsh realities of their plight.

Central to the narrative is the notion of communal resilience – the notion that in times of crisis, strength can be found in solidarity. Along their journey, the Joads encounter a tapestry of fellow travelers, each bearing their own burdens and scars of survival. Through shared stories and collective struggle, they weave a fabric of resilience that binds them together in their quest for dignity and justice.

As the Joads confront a succession of trials and tribulations, their resilience is tested to its very limits. From the loss of loved ones to the exploitative machinations of unscrupulous landowners, each obstacle serves as a crucible, forging their resolve with the fires of adversity. Yet, through it all, they cling to a glimmer of hope – a belief in the promise of a better tomorrow that refuses to be extinguished.

Embedded within the narrative is a poignant commentary on the human cost of unchecked capitalism and social injustice. Through the lens of the Joad family’s struggle, Steinbeck lays bare the inequities of a system that values profit over people, exposing the corrosive effects of greed and exploitation. Yet, amidst the darkness, there shines a beacon of resilience – a testament to the indomitable spirit of those who refuse to be cowed by the forces arrayed against them.

In the end, “The Grapes of Endurance” serves as a timeless reminder of the power of the human spirit to endure, to overcome, and to thrive in the face of adversity. Through the trials and triumphs of the Joad family, Steinbeck beckons us to find solace in our shared humanity, to draw strength from the bonds of community, and to embrace the resilience that lies within each of us. As we navigate the tumultuous seas of our own existence, may we take heart in the timeless lessons of survival and resilience that resonate so deeply within these hallowed pages.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Marrow Thieves — The Marrow Thieves: A Tale of Survival and Resilience

The Marrow Thieves: a Tale of Survival and Resilience

Categories: The Marrow Thieves

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Published: Sep 6, 2023

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Survival in a bleak world, exploring indigenous identity, character dynamics, a message of resilience, conclusion: a tale of hope and resilience.

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When someone asks you “What is this book about?” , there are a few ways you can answer. There’s “ plot ,” which refers to the literal events in the book, and there’s “character,” which refers to the people in the book and the struggles they overcome. Finally, there are themes in literature that correspond with the work’s topic and message. But what is theme in literature?

The theme of a story or poem refers to the deeper meaning of that story or poem. All works of literature contend with certain complex ideas, and theme is how a story or poem approaches these ideas.

There are countless ways to approach the theme of a story or poem, so let’s take a look at some theme examples and a list of themes in literature. We’ll discuss the differences between theme and other devices, like theme vs moral and theme vs topic. Finally, we’ll examine why theme is so essential to any work of literature, including to your own writing.

But first, what is theme? Let’s explore what theme is—and what theme isn’t.

Theme Definition

20 Common Themes in Literature

Theme Examples

Themes in Literature: A Hierarchy of Ideas

Why themes in literature matter.

Should I Decide the Themes of a Story in Advance?

Theme Definition: What is Theme?

Theme describes the central idea(s) that a piece of writing explores. Rather than stating this theme directly, the author will look at theme using the set of literary tools at their disposal. The theme of a story or poem will be explored through elements like characters , plot, settings , conflict, and even word choice and literary devices .

Theme definition: the central idea(s) that a piece of writing explores.

That said, theme is more than just an idea. It is also the work’s specific vantage point on that idea. In other words, a theme is an idea plus an opinion: it is the author’s specific views regarding the central ideas of the work.

All works of literature have these central ideas and opinions, even if those ideas and opinions aren’t immediate to the reader.

Justice, for example, is a literary theme that shows up in a lot of classical works. To Kill a Mockingbird contends with racial justice, especially at a time when the U.S. justice system was exceedingly stacked against African Americans. How can a nation call itself just when justice is used as a weapon?

By contrast, the play Hamlet is about the son of a recently-executed king. Hamlet seeks justice for his father and vows to kill Claudius—his father’s killer—but routinely encounters the paradox of revenge. Can justice really be found through more bloodshed?

What is theme? An idea + an opinion.

Clearly, these two works contend with justice in unrelated ways. All themes in literature are broad and open-ended, allowing writers to explore their own ideas about these complex topics.

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Let’s look at some common themes in literature. The ideas presented within this list of themes in literature show up in novels, memoirs, poems, and stories throughout history.

Theme Examples in Literature

Let’s take a closer look at how writers approach and execute theme. Themes in literature are conveyed throughout the work, so while you might not have read the books in the following theme examples, we’ve provided plot synopses and other relevant details where necessary. We analyze the following:

Power and Corruption in the novel Animal Farm
Loneliness in the short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
Love in the poem “How Do I Love Thee”

Theme Examples: Power and Corruption in the Novel Animal Farm

At its simplest, the novel Animal Farm by George Orwell is an allegory that represents the rise and moral decline of Communism in Russia. Specifically, the novel uncovers how power corrupts the leaders of populist uprisings, turning philosophical ideals into authoritarian regimes.

Most of the characters in Animal Farm represent key figures during and after the Russian Revolution. On an ailing farm that’s run by the negligent farmer Mr. Jones (Tsar Nicholas II), the livestock are ready to seize control of the land. The livestock’s discontent is ripened by Old Major (Karl Marx/Lenin), who advocates for the overthrow of the ruling elite and the seizure of private land for public benefit.

After Old Major dies, the pigs Napoleon (Joseph Stalin) and Snowball (Leon Trotsky) stage a revolt. Mr. Jones is chased off the land, which parallels the Russian Revolution in 1917. The pigs then instill “Animalism”—a system of government that advocates for the rights of the common animal. At the core of this philosophy is the idea that “all animals are equal”—an ideal that, briefly, every animal upholds.

Initially, the Animalist Revolution brings peace and prosperity to the farm. Every animal is well-fed, learns how to read, and works for the betterment of the community. However, when Snowball starts implementing a plan to build a windmill, Napoleon drives Snowball off of the farm, effectively assuming leadership over the whole farm. (In real life, Stalin forced Trotsky into exile, and Trotsky spent the rest of his life critiquing the Stalin regime until he was assassinated in 1940.)

Napoleon’s leadership quickly devolves into demagoguery, demonstrating the corrupting influence of power and the ways that ideology can breed authoritarianism. Napoleon uses Snowball as a scapegoat for whenever the farm has a setback, while using Squealer (Vyacheslav Molotov) as his private informant and public orator.

Eventually, Napoleon changes the tenets of Animalism, starts walking on two legs, and acquires other traits and characteristics of humans. At the end of the novel, and after several more conflicts , purges, and rule changes, the livestock can no longer tell the difference between the pigs and humans.

Themes in Literature: Power and Corruption in Animal Farm

So, how does Animal Farm explore the theme of “Power and Corruption”? Let’s analyze a few key elements of the novel.

Plot: The novel’s major plot points each relate to power struggles among the livestock. First, the livestock wrest control of the farm from Mr. Jones; then, Napoleon ostracizes Snowball and turns him into a scapegoat. By seizing leadership of the farm for himself, Napoleon grants himself massive power over the land, abusing this power for his own benefit. His leadership brings about purges, rule changes, and the return of inequality among the livestock, while Napoleon himself starts to look more and more like a human—in other words, he resembles the demagoguery of Mr. Jones and the abuse that preceded the Animalist revolution.

Thus, each plot point revolves around power and how power is wielded by corrupt leadership. At its center, the novel warns the reader of unchecked power, and how corrupt leaders will create echo chambers and private militaries in order to preserve that power.

Characters: The novel’s characters reinforce this message of power by resembling real life events. Most of these characters represent real life figures from the Russian Revolution, including the ideologies behind that revolution. By creating an allegory around Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the other leading figures of Communist Russia’s rise and fall, the novel reminds us that unchecked power foments disaster in the real world.

Literary Devices: There are a few key literary devices that support the theme of Power and Corruption. First, the novel itself is a “satirical allegory.” “ Satire ” means that the novel is ridiculing the behaviors of certain people—namely Stalin, who instilled far-more-dangerous laws and abuses that created further inequality in Russia/the U.S.S.R. While Lenin and Trotsky had admirable goals for the Russian nation, Stalin is, quite literally, a pig.

Meanwhile, “allegory” means that the story bears symbolic resemblance to real life, often to teach a moral. The characters and events in this story resemble the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, with the purpose of warning the reader about unchecked power.

Finally, an important literary device in Animal Farm is symbolism . When Napoleon (Stalin) begins to resemble a human, the novel suggests that he has become as evil and negligent as Mr. Jones (Tsar Nicholas II). Since the Russian Revolution was a rejection of the Russian monarchy, equating Stalin to the monarchy reinforces the corrupting influence of power, and the need to elect moral individuals to posts of national leadership.

Theme Examples: Loneliness in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”

Ernest Hemingway’s short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is concerned with the theme of loneliness. You can read this short story here . Content warning for mentions of suicide.

There are very few plot points in Hemingway’s story, so most of the story’s theme is expressed through dialogue and description. In the story, an old man stays up late drinking at a cafe. The old man has no wife—only a niece that stays with him—and he attempted suicide the previous week. Two waiters observe him: a younger waiter wants the old man to leave so they can close the cafe, while an older waiter sympathizes with the old man. None of these characters have names.

The younger waiter kicks out the old man and closes the cafe. The older waiter walks to a different cafe and ruminates on the importance of “a clean, well-lighted place” like the cafe he works at.

Themes in Literature: Loneliness in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”

Hemingway doesn’t tell us what to think about the old man’s loneliness, but he does provide two opposing viewpoints through the dialogue of the waiters.

The younger waiter has the hallmarks of a happy life: youth, confidence, and a wife to come home to. While he acknowledges that the old man is unhappy, he also admits “I don’t want to look at him,” complaining that the old man has “no regard for those who must work.” The younger waiter “did not wish to be unjust,” he simply wanted to return home.

The older waiter doesn’t have the privilege of turning away: like the old man, he has a house but not a home to return to, and he knows that someone may need the comfort of “a clean and pleasant cafe.”

The older waiter, like Hemingway, empathizes with the plight of the old man. When your place of rest isn’t a home, the world can feel like a prison, so having access to a space that counteracts this feeling is crucial. What kind of a place is that? The older waiter surmises that “the light of course” matters, but the place must be “clean and pleasant” too. Additionally, the place should not have music or be a bar: it must let you preserve the quiet dignity of yourself.

Lastly, the older waiter’s musings about God clue the reader into his shared loneliness with the old man. In a stream of consciousness, the older waiter recites traditional Christian prayers with “nada” in place of “God,” “Father,” “Heaven,” and other symbols of divinity. A bartender describes the waiter as “otro locos mas” (translation: another crazy), and the waiter concludes that his plight must be insomnia.

This belies the irony of loneliness: only the lonely recognize it. The older waiter lacks confidence, youth, and belief in a greater good. He recognizes these traits in the old man, as they both share a need for a clean, well-lighted place long after most people fall asleep. Yet, the younger waiter and the bartender don’t recognize these traits as loneliness, just the ramblings and shortcomings of crazy people.

Does loneliness beget craziness? Perhaps. But to call the waiter and old man crazy would dismiss their feelings and experiences, further deepening their loneliness.

Loneliness is only mentioned once in the story, when the young waiter says “He’s [the old man] lonely. I’m not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me.” Nonetheless, loneliness consumes this short story and its older characters, revealing a plight that, ironically, only the lonely understand.

Theme Examples: Love in the Poem “How Do I Love Thee”

Let’s turn towards brighter themes in literature: namely, love in poetry . Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “ How Do I Love Thee ” is all about the theme of love.

Themes in Literature: Love in “How Do I Love Thee”

Browning’s poem is a sonnet , which is a 14-line poem that often centers around love and relationships. Sonnets have different requirements depending on their form, but between lines 6-8, they all have a volta —a surprising line that twists and expands the poem’s meaning.

Let’s analyze three things related to the poem’s theme: its word choice, its use of simile and metaphor , and its volta.

Word Choice: Take a look at the words used to describe love. What do those words mean? What are their connotations? Here’s a brief list: “soul,” “ideal grace,” “quiet need,” “sun and candle-light,” “strive for right,” “passion,” “childhood’s faith,” “the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life,” “God,” “love thee better after death.”

These words and phrases all bear positive connotations, and many of them evoke images of warmth, safety, and the hearth. Even phrases that are morose, such as “lost saints” and “death,” are used as contrasts to further highlight the speaker’s wholehearted rejoicing of love. This word choice suggests an endless, benevolent, holistic, all-consuming love.

Simile and Metaphor: Similes and metaphors are comparison statements, and the poem routinely compares love to different objects and ideas. Here’s a list of those comparisons:

The speaker loves thee:

To the depths of her soul.
By sun and candle light—by day and night.
As men strive to do the right thing (freely).
As men turn from praise (purely).
With the passion of both grief and faith.
With the breath, smiles, and tears of her entire life.
Now in life, and perhaps even more after death.

The speaker’s love seems to have infinite reach, flooding every aspect of her life. It consumes her soul, her everyday activities, her every emotion, her sense of justice and humility, and perhaps her afterlife, too. For the speaker, this love is not just an emotion, an activity, or an ideology: it’s her existence.

Volta: The volta of a sonnet occurs in the poem’s center. In this case, the volta is the lines “I love thee freely, as men strive for right. / I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.”

What surprising, unexpected comparisons! To the speaker, love is freedom and the search for a greater good; it is also as pure as humility. By comparing love to other concepts, the speaker reinforces the fact that love isn’t just an ideology, it’s an ideal that she strives for in every word, thought, and action.

“Theme” is part of a broader hierarchy of ideas. While the theme of a story encompasses its central ideas, the writer also expresses these ideas through different devices.

You may have heard of some of these devices: motif, moral, topic, etc. What is motif vs theme? What is theme vs moral? These ideas interact with each other in different ways, which we’ve mapped out below.

Theme vs Topic

The “topic” of a piece of literature answers the question: What is this piece about? In other words, “topic” is what actually happens in the story or poem.

You’ll find a lot of overlap between topic and theme examples. Love, for instance, is both the topic and the theme of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “How Do I Love Thee.”

The difference between theme vs topic is: topic describes the surface level content matter of the piece, whereas theme encompasses the work’s apparent argument about the topic.

Topic describes the surface level content matter of the piece, whereas theme encompasses the work’s apparent argument about the topic.

So, the topic of Browning’s poem is love, while the theme is the speaker’s belief that her love is endless, pure, and all-consuming.

Additionally, the topic of a piece of literature is definitive, whereas the theme of a story or poem is interpretive. Every reader can agree on the topic, but many readers will have different interpretations of the theme. If the theme weren’t open-ended, it would simply be a topic.

Theme vs Motif

A motif is an idea that occurs throughout a literary work. Think of the motif as a facet of the theme: it explains, expands, and contributes to themes in literature. Motif develops a central idea without being the central idea itself .

Motif develops a central idea without being the central idea itself.

In Animal Farm , for example, we encounter motif when Napoleon the pig starts walking like a human. This represents the corrupting force of power, because Napoleon has become as much of a despot as Mr. Jones, the previous owner of the farm. Napoleon’s anthropomorphization is not the only example of power and corruption, but it is a compelling motif about the dangers of unchecked power.

Theme vs Moral

The moral of a story refers to the story’s message or takeaway. What can we learn from thinking about a specific piece of literature?

The moral is interpreted from the theme of a story or poem. Like theme, there is no single correct interpretation of a story’s moral: the reader is left to decide how to interpret the story’s meaning and message.

For example, in Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” the theme is loneliness, but the moral isn’t quite so clear—that’s for the reader to decide. My interpretation is that we should be much more sympathetic towards the lonely, since loneliness is a quiet affliction that many lonely people cannot express.

Great literature does not tell us what to think, it gives us stories to think about.

However, my interpretation could be miles away from yours, and that’s wonderful! Great literature does not tell us what to think, it gives us stories to think about, and the more we discuss our thoughts and interpretations, the more we learn from each other.

The theme of a story affects everything else: the decisions that characters make, the mood that words and images build, the moral that readers interpret, etc. Recognizing how writers utilize various themes in literature will help you craft stronger, more nuanced works of prose and poetry .

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” —Herman Melville

Whether a writer consciously or unconsciously decides the themes of their work, theme in literature acts as an organizing principle for the work as a whole. For writers, theme is especially useful to think about in the process of revision: if some element of your poem or story doesn’t point towards a central idea, it’s a sign that the work is not yet finished.

Moreover, literary themes give the work stakes . They make the work stand for something. Remember that our theme definition is an idea plus an opinion. Without that opinion element, a work of literature simply won’t stand for anything, because it is presenting ideas in the abstract without giving you something to react to. The theme of a story or poem is never just “love” or “justice,” it’s the author’s particular spin and insight on those themes. This is what makes a work of literature compelling or evocative. Without theme, literature has no center of gravity, and all the words and characters and plot points are just floating in the ether.

Should I Decide the Theme of a Story or Poem in Advance?

You can, though of course it depends on the actual story you want to tell. Some writers certainly start with a theme. You might decide you want to write a story about themes like love, family, justice, gender roles, the environment, or the pursuit of revenge.

From there, you can build everything else: plot points, characters, conflicts, etc. Examining themes in literature can help you generate some strong story ideas !

Nonetheless, theme is not the only way to approach a creative writing project. Some writers start with plot, others with character, others with conflicts, and still others with just a vague notion of what the story might be about. You might not even realize the themes in your work until after you finish writing it.

You certainly want your work to have a message, but deciding what that message is in advance might actually hinder your writing process. Many writers use their poems and stories as opportunities to explore tough questions, or to arrive at a deeper insight on a topic. In other words, you can start your work with ideas, and even opinions on those ideas, but don’t try to shoehorn a story or poem into your literary themes. Let the work explore those themes. If you can surprise yourself or learn something new from the writing process, your readers will certainly be moved as well.

So, experiment with ideas and try different ways of writing. You don’t have think about the theme of a story right away—but definitely give it some thought when you start revising your work!

Develop Great Themes at Writers.com

As writers, it’s hard to know how our work will be viewed and interpreted. Writing in a community can help. Whether you join our Facebook group or enroll in one of our upcoming courses , we have the tools and resources to sharpen your writing.

Sean Glatch

18 comments.

Sean Glatch,Thank you very much for your discussion on themes. It was enlightening and brought clarity to an abstract and sometimes difficult concept to explain and illustrate. The sample stories and poem were appreciated too as they are familiar to me. High School Language Arts Teacher

Hi Stephanie, I’m so glad this was helpful! Happy teaching 🙂

Wow!!! This is the best resource on the subject of themes that I have ever encountered and read on the internet. I just bookmarked it and plan to use it as a resource for my teaching. Thank you very much for publishing this valuable resource.

Hi Marisol,

Thank you for the kind words! I’m glad to hear this article will be a useful resource. Happy teaching!

Warmest, Sean

builders beams bristol

What is Theme? A Look at 20 Common Themes in Literature | writers.com

Hello! This is a very informative resource. Thank you for sharing.

farrow and ball pigeon

This presentation is excellent and of great educational value. I will employ it already in my thesis research studies.

John Never before communicated with you!

Brilliant! Thank you.

[…] THE MOST COMMON THEMES IN LITERATURE […]

marvellous. thumbs up

Thank you. Very useful information.

found everything in themes. thanks. so much

In college I avoided writing classes and even quit a class that would focus on ‘Huck Finn’ for the entire semester. My idea of hell. However, I’ve been reading and learning from the writers.com articles, and I want to especially thank Sean Glatch who writes in a way that is useful to aspiring writers like myself.

You are very welcome, Anne! I’m glad that these resources have been useful on your writing journey.

Thank you very much for this clear and very easy to understand teaching resources.

Hello there. I have a particular question.

Can you describe the exact difference of theme, issue and subject?

I get confused about these.

I love how helpful this is i will tell my class about it!

A Long Walk to Water

Linda sue park, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Linda Sue Park’s A Long Walk to Water is a story about the lengths to which people will go in order to survive. The book is divided into two storylines, which remain separate until the final chapter (in fact, the final sentence). In the first storyline, set in Southern Sudan in 1985, an eleven–year-old boy named Salva Dut is forced to flee his village due to the outbreak of civil war. In the second storyline, set in 2008, a young Sudanese girl named Nya works hard to gather water for her family, often spending entire days walking to and from the nearest pond to collect the dirty water. The storylines offer two variations on the theme of survival: in each, extraordinarily difficult circumstances force children to fight for the most basic necessities of nourishment and safety.

Many of the most moving scenes in A Long Walk to Water revolve around the harsh truth that the concern for one’s own survival trumps almost everything else. In a recurring motif of Salva’s storyline, adults and other families refuse to give Salva food or protection, even though Salva is an innocent kid who has lost his parents and is in need of help. The adults reason that Salva is so small that he’ll slow down the entire group—a serious problem, considering that the group is trying to flee enemy soldiers as quickly as possible. At the most basic level, other people refuse to help Salva because they value their own survival more highly than that of others. Similarly, in Nya’s storyline, Nya is forced to spend her days fetching water from the pond—a physically demanding task that consumes almost all of her time and strength. No child should have to work as hard as Nya works. However, the difficult conditions of south Sudan (in particular, the almost total lack of drinkable water) force Nya and the rest of her family to sacrifice their comfort, since the alternative is to die of dehydration. Even though Nya is only a small child, she seems to understand the gravity of her family’s situation; as a result, she works hard to gather water. Here, and throughout A Long Water to Water , the necessity of surviving forces the characters to sacrifice their compassion, their happiness, and more.

But even as survival is of enormous importance to the Sudanese characters in the book, Park demonstrates that, at times, some things do trump survival. In various instances, characters risk their own survival in order to help others—usually because these other people are a part of their family, or share some kind of strong cultural bond. For instance, when a group of refugees eventually decides to take Salva with them, even though doing so will slow down the group, they offer a simple reason for their decision: Salva is Dinka, a member of the tribe to which they also belong. Along similar lines, Salva’s most important protector during the long march out of Sudan is his uncle, Jewiir. Jewiir repeatedly sacrifices his own safety, food, and energy to make sure that Salva stays safe. He makes impractical decisions in Salva’s interest—and does so without any hesitation—because Salva is a part of his family. Everyone wants to survive, A Long Walk to Water suggests, and yet, sometimes, people are willing to risk their own survival to help others out of of a sense of compassion or kinship.

Although A Long Walk to Water is a book for young adults, it poses some difficult questions about the nature of survival. At one point, Salva witnesses the adults he’s travelling with sacrifice a portion of their water supply—an action which seriously endangers their own lives—in order to save the lives of men who are dying of dehydration. Salva wonders if he would do what they had done, and risk his own survival to help other people. Interestingly, Salva never answers his own question, suggesting that many of the moral problems that he encounters in Sudan are too difficult for any easy answer. Nevertheless, A Long Walk to Water suggests that people who have been prosperous and fortunate do have an obligation to help less fortunate people survive. For instance, after being adopted by an American couple and growing up in New York, Salva founds a nonprofit organization with the mission of providing clean water for impoverished Sudanese villages. In this case, Salva isn’t sacrificing his survival in any way—rather, he’s making relatively small sacrifices in his own life (and encouraging donors to do the same) in order to make a big difference in the lives of countless Sudanese people. Ultimately, A Long Walk to Water has an altruistic message, championing the everyday efforts of those who do what they can to improve their corner of the world. Park isn’t asking readers to risk their lives for the sake of others’ survival, but she is asking that they use their resources to work together to improve the lives of people who struggle to survive.

Survival ThemeTracker

Survival Quotes in A Long Walk to Water

Nya filled the container all the way to the top. Then she tied the gourd back in place and took the padded cloth doughnut from her pocket. The doughnut went on her head first, followed by the heavy container of water, which she would hold in place with one hand.

The tears were hot in Salva's eyes. Where had everyone gone? Why had they left without waking him? He knew the answer: because he was a child . . . who might tire easily and slow them down, and complain about being hungry, and cause trouble somehow.

Nya nodded. She picked up the plastic container and took Akeer by the hand. Home for just long enough to eat, Nya would now make her second trip to the pond. To the pond and back—to the pond and back—nearly a full day of walking altogether. This was Nya’s daily routine seven months of the year.

The man nodded and turned to the group. "We will take him with us,” he said.

Salva looked up quickly. A few in the group were shaking their heads and grumbling. The man shrugged. "He is Dinka” he said, and began walking again.

The boy was still looking at him. "Your family?" he asked. Salva shook his head. "Me, too,” the boy said. He sighed, and Salva heard that sigh all the way to his heart. Their eyes met. "I'm Salva.” "I'm Marial.” It was good to make a friend.

As Salva spoke, Uncle nodded or shook his head. His face became very solemn when Salva told him that he had not seen nor heard a single word of his family in all that time. Salva's voice trailed of, and he lowered his head. He was glad to see Uncle again, but it looked as if he might not be much help either. Uncle was quiet for a moment. Then he patted Salva’s shoulder. "Eh, Nephew!" he said in a cheerful voice. "We are together now, so I will look after you!"

A trip like that would be very difficult for Akeer. Should they stay at the camp and let her rest so she might heal on her own? Or should they begin the long hard walk—and hope they reached help in time?

The water from the holes in the lakebed could be collected only in tiny amounts. If her mother tried to boil such a small amount, the pot would be dry long before they could count to two hundred.

Salva looked at the hollow eyes and the cracked lips of the men lying on the hot sand, and his own mouth felt so dry that he nearly choked when he tried to swallow. "If you give them your water, you will not have enough for yourself!" the same voice shouted. "It is useless-they will die, and you will die with them!"

Salva made up his mind. He would walk south, to Kenya. He did not know what he would find once he got there, but it seemed to be his best choice.

Crowds of other boys followed him. Nobody talked about it, but by the end of the first day Salva had become the leader of a group of about fifteen hundred boys. Some were as young as five years old.

Whatever food or water they found was shared equally among all of them. When the smaller boys grew too tired to walk, the older boys took turns carrying them on their backs. There were times when some of the boys did not want to do their share of the work. Salva would talk to them, encourage them, coax and persuade them. Once in a while he had to speak sternly, or even shout. But he tried not to do this too often. It was as if Salva's family were helping him, even though they were not there.

The rumor was that about three thousand boys and young men from the refugee camps would be chosen to go live in America!

Salva stood still inside the terminal doors for a few moments. Leaving the airport felt like leaving his old life forever-Sudan, his village, his family. . . . Tears came to his eyes, perhaps from the cold air blowing in through the open doors. His new family was already outside; they turned and looked back at him. Salva blinked away the tears and took his first step into a new life in America.

Nya went back and picked up the plastic can. She felt as if she were flying. School! She would learn to read and write!

"I will come to the village,” Salva promised, “as soon as it is safe!”

“We will be there waiting for you,” his father promised in turn.

Salva pressed his face tightly to his father's as they hugged goodbye, their tears flowing and blending together.

Whenever he found himself losing hope, Salva would take a deep breath and think of his uncle’s words. A step at as time. One problem at a time—just figure out this one problem. Day by day, solving one problem at a time, Salva moved toward his goal.

In a few more days, the school would be finished. Nya and Dep and Akeer would all go to school, along with the other children. Next year there would be a marketplace where the villagers could sell and buy vegetables and chickens and other goods. There was even talk of a clinic someday—a medical clinic, so they wouldn’t have to walk so far to get help, as they had to when Akeer was ill.

The man smiled. "What is your name?” he asked. "I am Nya." "I am happy to meet you, Nya," he said. "My name is Salva. "

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture pp 1–45 Cite as

Survival: An Introductory Essay

Rudolf Freiburg 3 &
Gerd Bayer 3
First Online: 15 December 2021

318 Accesses

This introduction emphasizes the multidimensionality of the issue of ‘survival’, which frequently implies complex acts of ethical decisions. First focussing on the ‘survival of individuals’, it studies survival in the context of the philosophy of ‘natural law’, connecting it to mythology and theology. A passage on the ‘survival of groups’ exemplifies the supportive character of ‘team spirit’ in the act of survival. Survival in Holocaust camps illustrates the blurring lines of the ‘ethics of survival’. Discussing the Darwinian notion of the ‘survival of the fittest’ in the camps, ‘survivor’s guilt’ and the depressions and suicides of many survivors, the introduction develops a hypothesis about the ‘dialectics of survival’, arguing that survival often requires a high price. The introduction closes with comments about the Anthropocene, when survival can no longer rest exclusively on anthropocentric principles.

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Survival as an Omnipresent Issue in Life and Literature

“They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind, and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. […] they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.” Footnote 1 From the materialistic perspective of biology, survival seems to be an automatic genetic device deeply installed into the dynamic programme of life by evolution leading to a kind of “biologicized” ethics. Footnote 2 As a feature of the élan vital or the vis vitalis , the genetic drive to survive seems to be consistent with Charles Darwin’s and Herbert Spencer’s insights into the dynamics of evolution, namely that those who survive have functions which “happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces”. Footnote 3 Biology defines survival as a life-long struggle and a permanent process, an everyday affair, a perpetuum mobile of existential provenience, a ‘mechanical operation of the spirit’ of nature which reduces all ‘animals’, including those called ‘humans’, to well-oiled machines trained to survive deadly perils without a will of their own, uncannily reminiscent of the Cartesian concept of ‘beast machines’. Footnote 4

However convincing and elegant this biological explanation of survival may appear, it does not pay enough attention to the multidimensionality of survival as an issue in ‘conscious lives’ of human beings. Footnote 5 With regard to human nature, survival is more than a merely mechanistic, biological process easily to be defined in the sterile language of scientists. In the human world, survival is closely affiliated with complex questions concerning such different areas as history, politics, psychology, theology and religion, society, culture and of course ethics, to name but a few. The omnipresence of the issue of survival cannot be ignored: as long as we live—in a certain sense—we all are survivors; individual survivors of an extremely troublesome day or night, of a disease or an accident, but—and here the topic reveals its infinite potential—also especially after we (maybe as a group or society) have survived natural cataclysms such as pandemics (the actual Covid-19 pandemic included), earthquakes, tsunamis or man-made catastrophes such as wars or genocides, or probably the worst of all, the Holocaust. And the human desire to survive is in fact so strong that it even transcends worldly life and aims at an imagined existence ‘beyond the grave’, manifesting itself as the wish to be resurrected after death. Footnote 6

The omnipresence and the significance of the issue of survival in life are impressively covered in literary texts. Sensitized for the relevance of the topos of survival, readers will detect it almost everywhere. The renowned ‘masterworks’ of world literature are populated by ‘survivors’: Homer’s Odyssey (eighth–seventh centuries BC), Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605/1615), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899), Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers (1926–1943), Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (1997), Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs (2010) and Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time (2016); the list could go on endlessly. The literary representation of survival comprises purely imaginary stories and fictions based on authentic experiences, biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, parables, allegories and testimonies. Even the most fictional stories like, for instance, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) or Kevin Brooks’s The Bunker Diaries (2013) reveal valuable insights into the conditions, processes, ethical issues and consequences of actual survival, since they represent an exemplary situation which mirrors the universality of the general survival context, defined as the ‘microeconomic mode’ by Jane Elliott, a paradigm with an intense exemplary nature “so that the world writ small enables us to understand the world writ large”. Footnote 7 Literature of this kind allows the vicarious experience of approaching the field of liminality, of humans existing in a danger zone, but they exude the aura of “faux-laboratory settings”, Footnote 8 under which “protagonists must make agonized binary choices between horrific options, each of which involves intense physical and potentially deadly consequences. In its fullest manifestations, the aesthetic effect of this mode is brutal in every sense of the word: crude, harsh, ruthless, unrelenting, and unpleasantly precise.” Footnote 9

Fictions based on authentic experience, which may encompass biographies, autobiographies and memoirs, claim a higher degree of seriousness, frequently accompanied by either explicit or implicit warnings, moral exhortations, political agendas, suggestions for social reformation or the necessity to revise obsolete value systems. The borderline between the first and the second category of these ‘survival stories’, however, is far from being clear: when the claim to authenticity is revealed as being not as strong as the reader thought it to be, or when it can even be unmasked as a mere ‘fake’, the reader’s reaction will definitively be changed. Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), an instance of the first case, the ‘realistic’ description of the struggle to survive the plague in London in the seventeenth century, remains completely convincing and instructive for quite a while until one recognizes that the author could not have witnessed the events with his own eyes. Footnote 10 Readers will probably react with indignation and disdain when they find out that a survival story, especially one referring to the Holocaust, was forged, as was the case with Binjamin Wilkomirski’s allegedly authentic autobiography Fragments: Memoirs of a Wartime Childhood (1995). Footnote 11 Judged from an ethical point of view, such forgeries are both dangerous and contestable, since they may be misused and become grist to the mill of right-wing deniers of the Holocaust.

Parables and allegories of survival are legion in world literature: the mythical story of Prometheus, punished by Zeus for bringing fire to men, Tantalus and his legendary torments, the myth of Sisyphus, who must forever heave a boulder up a hill only to see it roll down again after he has reached the top, the story of Philomela, whose tongue is cut out so that she cannot speak about having been raped. Myths like these exemplify essential aspects of survival to such a degree that throughout the ages they were accepted as paradigmatic stories suitable to all situations, since as myths they allow a huge potentiality of adaptability to different existential crises where life is at stake. The Bible offers a rich gallery of parables and allegories, describing such diverse survivors as Noah, Job and Joseph in the Old Testament, or telling the stories of Lazarus, the Good Samaritan or Christ’s crucifixion and ensuing resurrection in the New Testament. The many survival stories in legends, sagas and folklore prove that memories of ‘survivors’ are deeply engraved into the collective memory of mankind, to such a degree even that the topos can claim the status of an archetype. Even in contemporary trauma contexts, these allegorical texts with their more or less mythical auras are reanimated, they are widely used as ‘prefabricated’ narrative stereotypical illustrations of suffering, grief, endeavour, endurance and resilience, and they often replace an individual’s testimony, when the sufferer—due to a severe traumatic experience—has completely lost his or her capacity to speak. As ‘microeconomic modes’, the parables and allegories condense a complex experience to a minimal narrative form which offers various interpretations. In her book Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001), Ruth Kluger, for instance, refers to the Viennese legend of ‘Drunken August’, who in the dark fell into a ditch filled with corpses only to step out of it on the next day as if nothing had happened, and comments on this parable of survival with the memorable words “We are different. We don’t get off so cheaply; the ghosts cling to us”. Footnote 12 And a legendary story also serves her as an illustration of her own precarious feelings after survival; pointing out the psychological accessory symptoms of survival, she remembers the story of the “Rider of Constance”:

In New York the fear of death which had haunted me in Auschwitz gradually turned into its opposite, into depression, the temptation of death. There is an apt German legend about a winter so cold that Lake Constance was frozen solid, which never happens in reality, since the lake is much too large. One night, according to the story, a horseman unwittingly crossed it. When he got to the other shore and had firm ground under his feet he looked back and realized where he had been, what he had done, and how unnatural his survival was. Tradition says he died of shock on the spot. I sympathized with that horseman. Footnote 13

The most significant genre for the literary representation of survival is the ‘testimony’, which has been intensely analysed by the relatively young discipline of trauma studies. Footnote 14 The testimony has an oscillating character; it intends to give insight into the ‘reality’ of a traumatic experience, signalling at the same time that it will never be capable to do so precisely, because the impact of the trauma has violated the capability of ‘witnessing’. Footnote 15 “Trauma brings about a dissociation of affect and representation: one disorientingly feels what one cannot represent; one numbingly represents what one cannot feel.” Footnote 16 The testimony is a product of the ‘traumatic memory’ of an individual “possessed by an image or an event”, Footnote 17 varying from all other forms of literary endeavours by a specific dialectics of approaching the moment of crisis and simultaneously distancing itself from it by using techniques of postmodern writing, symbolism and cryptophoria or by including gothic elements and ghost stories. Footnote 18 Testimonies indicate both a ‘failure of the mind’ of the survivor and a general ‘failure of language’, Footnote 19 since survivors may not be able to really understand and describe with words what happened to them. They feel impelled to return to the traumatic event again and again, in order to find some ‘meaning’ in it. Footnote 20 In testimonies, the ‘witnesses’ in a certain sense ‘create themselves’, by leaving the space of silence behind and by establishing an “internal ‘thou’”, a ‘listener’, to whom they can tell their stories. Footnote 21 The testimony does not vie with the ‘factuality’ of historiography, it may even contradict some of the historiographer’s truths. Footnote 22 In testimonies, “issues of biography and history are neither simply represented nor simply reflected, but are reinscribed, translated, radically rethought and fundamentally worked over by the text”. Footnote 23 In its own particular aesthetics of dynamic vagueness, however, it remains paradoxically close to the ‘subjective truth’ of what the individual had to suffer, however distorted some details may appear:

Writing trauma is a metaphor in that writing indicates some distance from trauma (even when the experience of writing is itself intimately bound up with trauma), and there is no such thing as writing trauma itself if only because trauma, while at times related to particular events, cannot be localized in terms of a discrete, dated experience. Trauma indicates a shattering break or cesura in experience which has belated effects. Writing trauma would be one of those telling after-effects in what I termed traumatic and post-traumatic writing (or signifying practice in general). Footnote 24

The function of literature does not limit itself to a mere mimetic process of imitating survival in textual form. For many survivors, literature offers a kind of solace, reminiscent of Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae (sixth century); the deep feeling of complete isolation and separation from the ‘normal’ world, which often accompanies survival, can at least slightly be mitigated if the survivor is able to think of antecedent instances of suffering in literature. Primo Levi’s memories of Auschwitz are enriched with references to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1321); placed in the ‘ l’univers concentrationnaire ’, Footnote 25 in a ‘limbo’ that defies description in ‘his own words’, he falls back to a beautiful and terrific poetic collocation of the “dance of dead men” in order to portray the dismal scene before his eyes and he compares the prisoner’s torments with those of Tantalus. Footnote 26

The imaginary homeland of literature and culture could be a psychological support and solace in the camps, but it was by far no guarantee for survival; on the contrary, life in the camps was especially hard for those prisoners who possessed an intellectual background. It was probably the group of intellectuals, professors, teachers, lawyers and doctors who suffered most. Intensely humiliated in their personalities, a profound alienation from their familiar world of cultural education set in. The relationship between literature and survival is Janus-faced: for a small group of the inmates, the remembrance of literary texts offered a momentary chance of escapism from the harsh reality of the camps, the majority, however, preferred not to think and remember at all, to concentrate on the process of survival exclusively, finding no consolation in the rich cultural heritage they had brought with them.

No one has given a more succinct and haunting analysis of the intellectual’s life in the camps than Jean Améry, who testifies to the complete breakdown of his former personality and identity. During his time in the camp, he is on the verge of losing confidence in everything he has believed in so far; the sages of philosophy, to whom he as an agnostic (before and after the experiences in the camp) might have turned in different situations of distress, now appear to him as ridiculous “failing household gods”, Footnote 27 as helpless as himself, and he openly admires those believers who resort on their religious or political certainties. Footnote 28 For him, the attempt to transcend the reality of the camps and escape into an intellectual sphere is completely impossible: “In no other place did the attempt to transcend it prove so hopeless and so shoddy”. Footnote 29 The intellectual capacity to understand the brutal actuality of reality intensified the high degree of tortures all prisoners were exposed to.

The Definition of ‘Survival’

‘Survival’ has a wide scope of meaning. Footnote 30 Most speakers use the term in order to express the “continuing to live after some event […]; remaining alive, living on” Footnote 31 —the act of surviving something dangerous, often life-threatening like accidents, calamities, wars or earthquakes. The meaning of the term also includes the following definition: “Continuance after the end or cessation of something else, or after some event; spec . continuance of a custom, observance, etc. after the circumstances or conditions in which it originated or which gave significance to it have passed away”. Footnote 32 In the German language, there is an interesting use of the term, especially in its reflexive form and as an adjective (‘ sich überleben ’, ‘ überlebt ’), which expresses the notion of ‘obsoleteness’, the idea that something or someone does not fit into the present time any more, circumscribing a deep, frequently existential, dynamic process of intense alienation. Survival is a complex process, for which a general definition can hardly be given. At all events, however, survival requires an ‘object’ (or event) that has to be got rid of or left behind, and these objects such as disease, injury, trauma, war or catastrophe are defined by a high potential of explicit or implicit harm which can be inflicted on human beings.

A definitive feature of survival is ‘agency’, a rather paradoxical notion in a context which—due to the prevalence of suffering—is usually associated with passivity. The term ‘suffering agency’, used in contemporary analyses of survival, aptly illustrates this paradox, Footnote 33 since the ‘passive’ sufferer has to remain extremely ‘active’ in order to survive. Footnote 34 This ‘passive activity’ consists of mourning (‘ Trauerarbeit ’, facing the loss of the former life culture and social recognition), but it also implies endurance, alertness, resilience, ‘involuntary willingness’ to stand blows and injuries, the energy to consolidate or reform value systems, and the capacity to adjust dreams and hopes to the unavoidable factuality of the ‘here and now’ (the harsh, insurmountable ‘reality’ described by Améry). The definition of survival should also heed the fact that survival does not ‘cease’ after an existential crisis has been ‘left behind’. The stereotypical phrases which define the ending of fairy tales, “And they lived on happily ever after (and died together on the same day)”, assume a cynical undertone in this context and have to be replaced by the recognition of—what I choose to call—‘the dialectics of survival’. Footnote 35

The specific temporality of survival also causes Jacques Derrida to ponder the semantic nuances of ‘surviving’ and ‘survival’, when he differentiates between the process of survivance and the supposedly completed pastness of la survie . Writing under the impression of his own fatality following his falling ill with cancer, Derrida in his last interview reflects on the way in which survival can, in some cases, outlast the individual. He even suggests that the notion of survival provides an underlying rationale to most of this writing and thinking: “I have always been interested in this theme of survival, the meaning of which is not to be added on to living and dying. It is originary: life is living on, life is survival”. Footnote 36 For Derrida, surviving is the element that intrinsically links life and death: “We are all survivors who have been granted a temporary reprieve”. Footnote 37 The consequences of this insight, in particular for an intellectual whose work is based on writing, affect the attitude in which writing and publishing simultaneously connect finality and continuity, paradoxically linking life and death: “Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, ‘proceeds’ from me, unable to be reappropriated, I live my death in writing”. Footnote 38 Indeed, for Derrida, survival implicates both existential modes in that it extends beyond the merely physical limitations of human life: “I would not want to encourage an interpretation that situates surviving on the side of death and the past rather than life and the future”. Footnote 39 Since such a view on surviving ( survivance ) reflects back on any premortal stage, it also affects an understanding of how to live, it creates an acute urgency in experiencing the quality of existence: “survival is not simply that which remains but the most intense life possible”. Footnote 40 To be a survivor, then, is to live life intensely and mindfully.

The Survival of Individuals

The significance of survival is an implicit commentary on the value of life: Footnote 41 life in general, social life and individual life. Traditionally, the ethics of survival discuss the dynamic interferences of individuals, groups and an adversarial environment. From an individual perspective, the survival theme is intensely affiliated with discourses of ‘natural law’ and ‘natural right’. Footnote 42 As an individual, a human being is separated from the outer world, in both physical, psychic and intellectual ways. The skin of the body is the borderline between ‘me’ and the ‘other’ person, the bones of the skull metaphorically ‘de-fine’ the area of a person’s psychic and intellectual ‘autonomy’. Transgressions of the first borderline, as the horrible ‘first blow’, described by Améry, a violation of the skin, or an eye injury, prove the essential vulnerability of human beings, Footnote 43 symbolize the invasion of ‘otherness’, into one’s most intimate universe, an event Hans Blumenberg described as an encounter with ‘the absolute’. Footnote 44 As a biological response to this confrontation, the genetic automatism of releasing unconscious survival instincts is triggered. But these instincts are also accompanied by an intellectual justification of any form of activity appropriate to reach this first and foremost goal. This impulse to defend one’s integrity, triggered by the ‘selfish genes’ and frequently sublimed into acts of secret protest, resistance and resilience, Footnote 45 finds its philosophical explanation and legitimization in the writings of natural law philosophers, Footnote 46 whose influence can be traced back to Aristotelian and Platonic doctrines. Footnote 47 Believing in the factuality of intrinsic values all human beings share, the ius naturale establishes an alternative system of rules and principles that may overwrite the regulations of the ‘positive law’, the product of political power, no matter where and when this positive law was established. From the perspective of such seminal representatives of the ius naturale such as Samuel von Pufendorf, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, the natural law may abrogate any positive law, if an individual’s existence is in danger of death:

And because the condition of man […] is a condition of Warre of every one against every one; in which case every one is governed by his own Reason; and there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemyes; It followeth, that in such a condition every man has a Right to every thing; even to one anothers body. And therefore, as long as this naturall Right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, (how strong or wise soever he be), of living out the time, which Nature ordinarily alloweth men to live. And consequently it is a precept, or generall rule of Reason, That every man, ought to endeavour Peace, as farre as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all helps and advantages of Warre . The first branch of which Rule, containeth the first and Fundamentall Law of Nature; which is: to seek Peace, and follow it . The Second, the summe of the Right of Nature, which is, By all means we can to defend our selves . Footnote 48

Natural law with its inherent ‘categorial imperative’ of self-defence is based on the concept of man as an autonomous being, and in this respect, it precedes the mentality of the Enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century. The decision to survive a crisis and to defend one’s own ‘inviolacy’ with all means is both, an ‘instinctive’ and a ‘rational’ decision, a distinctive feature of human beings by which the automatic biological and genetic reactions to danger of death are ethically seconded. In the context of human survival, Enlightenment philosophy appears as a sustained effort to secure mankind’s survival, shaping reason into a tool which—according to Sir Francis Bacon’s famous definition—serves for the “use and benefit of man”, Footnote 49 by improving the conditions under which human beings are doomed to live. The Enlighteners’ fight against prejudices, superstitions and wrong notions—against the idols of the ‘tribe, the cave, the theatre and the market-place’, in Bacon’s words Footnote 50 —is a rationalistic stratagem of survival, leading to the foundation of the Royal Society in England and bringing about a plethora of discoveries (among them that of the solution of the problem of the ‘Longitude’), detections and inventions which have indubitably contributed to improve survival in the modern world. However, it must be counted among the darkest chapters in the intellectual history of mankind that rationality, this strong tool, invented for the benefit and survival of men, was tragically perverted and ended up in a desolate state, commonly referred to as the ‘dialectics of rationality’. Footnote 51

The tight and complex nexus between surviving, individuality, identity and rationality permeates most survival stories and shapes the tradition of the ethics of survival clearly based on a staunch belief in the ‘autonomy of man’. But this autonomy is often limited by the forces of mythology and religion. Especially until the period of the Enlightenment, but even in the following centuries the topic of survival had strong mythological and religious connotations. Before the impact of rationalistic philosophy transformed the general view of the world into a scientific observation of reality, both mythology and religion were looked upon as legitimate explanations for the enigmatic character of life; birth, death, happiness, danger, but also accidents, misfortunes, calamities and diseases were regarded as the material manifestations of an abstract metaphysical intention either by pagan mythological divinity, by the Christian God or the Gods of other religions. In the Western world, the concept of the nemesis divina , the divine lust for revenge and punishment, played a vital part in attempts to find reasons for all kinds of disaster. Fate or predestination are likely to cancel the belief in the close affiliation between survival and free will. The nature of the biblical God defined by his omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence rules out the possibility that catastrophes and calamities human beings experience could be interpreted as ‘accidents’; they reveal a higher purpose as lessons or warnings, Footnote 52 being meaningful in themselves, because they implement a divine secret plan concealed from the eyes of the mortals. In the ‘book of nature’, calamities are the ‘moral fables’ with clear messages revealed. Footnote 53 The classical explanatory system of disaster is of course the doctrine of ‘theodicy’, the attempt to justify the ways of God to Men. Footnote 54 In mythological contexts, it is not in the power of man to secure his survival; a human being is the cue ball of the whimsical goddesses of fate, who mystically spin the threads of man’s life. An insurgency against God’s will or predestined fate cannot but end in tragedy.

Two paradigmatic texts are briefly described to explain the difference between religious contexts of survival and their counterparts, stories which follow a rather agnostic philosophy. In Defoe’s Journal of the Plague year, belief is an essential precondition for survival. The narrator clearly believes in God, he bases his decision to stay in town, when the plague causes so many people to die, on the interpretation of subtle ‘signs’, which he seems to have received from Heaven. The story is interspersed with prayers to God, who is asked for solace, support and strength. Survival depends on God, and the sinner is doomed to die. Defoe’s narrator leaves no doubt about this simple recognition. In a drastic scene, he describes how a group of drunkards and licentious people make fun of one of the plague’s victims, who lost his family during the epidemic, and the rabble even dares to utter blasphemous words. It is with no small degree of satisfaction that the narrator describes how the blasphemers ‘were punished by God’ only days later, when they, too, died of the plague. Footnote 55

Whereas in Defoe’s survival story catastrophes display an inherent teleology of divine provenience, the principle of radical contingency prevails in Voltaire’s famous satire Candide (1759). Candide and his mentor Pangloss live in a world of violence, rape and war, and although all their experiences can be summarized as an unbearable sequence of injuries, tortures, loss and disasters of all kinds, Pangloss recommends Candide to still believe in the ‘best of all possible worlds’; Voltaire, who luxuriously quotes Leibniz’s formula of theodicy, presents a grim story of survival where the survivors have kept their life but lost all their happiness. The implication is clear: if survival is in God’s hand, it must be a rather inhuman God who sends his creatures on such a journey of loss and pain. Voltaire’s story suggests atheism as a counterweight to theodicy. Footnote 56 For Voltaire, survival is not a matter of divine providence, survival is defined by the accidental processes of radical contingency.

The Survival of Groups

The survival of groups does not differ in a substantial way from the survival of individuals, but the general conditions are changed. The sudden encounter of a group with the ‘absolute’, the experience of an unexpected disaster may be as horrible as the traumatic experience of an individual, but nevertheless it is a ‘shared experience’, and this awareness of a ‘community’ may offer a kind of solace and support. Footnote 57 The survival of groups is a complex issue, fusing elements of emotion and rationality together, using psychological stratagems of encouraging each other in the common attempt to survive. This feeling of an intense solidarity is probably the cornerstone of a well-functioning group; its identity rests on complex processes of social practices to intensify the feeling of ‘belonging together’, cherishing common notions and pursuing the same goals. These social practices, which may be accompanied by attitudes of xenophobia and violent acts of excluding others from the community, can be so strong that they turn a group into a hysterical ‘mass’ of individuals who have sacrificed their own individuality in favour of the group, as frequently happened in those periods of history when the group spirit was infected by fascistic ideology. But apart from this disdainful mode of group dynamics, a community following unitary principles, sharing the same value systems and acting according to a plan based on common decisions has a fairly good chance to survive many crises. Now single tasks can be distributed to individual members of the group, a successful ‘team spirit’ may end in the choice of an apt ‘leader’ who shoulders the duty of coordinating, controlling and adjusting the single acts necessary for overcoming an existential crisis. Footnote 58 The achievements of such a ‘survival group’ depend on solidarity, honesty, resilience, loyalty to the common goals, the willingness to suspend one’s own personal wishes in favour of group interests and the persistent readiness to become a ‘cog in a wheel’ for a machine programmed to survive. Communication between the members of a group plays a significant role. Footnote 59 The more homogenous, or better ‘uniform’, the group appears, the greater chances it has to survive catastrophes or pandemics.

But this success comes at a high price. The group may still claim autonomy, but the individual members of the group have to face a gradual loss of liberty and privacy. Footnote 60 As Michel Foucault has analysed with his habitual laserlike precision, ‘control’, ‘surveillance’, ‘discipline’ and ‘self-discipline’ are the usual companions of establishing stratagems of survival in a group. Footnote 61 Under extreme conditions, a society may thus gradually be transformed into a kind of prisonhouse, with the citizens as prisoners who find ‘shelter’ in this building but simultaneously lose their freedom. To put it more succinctly, the prisonhouse is rather a ‘panopticum’, a vitreous monument of surveillance, where single inhabitants feel surveilled so intensely that they ‘voluntarily’ give up any activity which does not conform with common principles or common ‘ethics’. Footnote 62

The Individual and the ‘Group’: The Ethics of Survival

Although groups show astounding similarities, they differ in various aspects: solidarity, communication, team spirit, the feeling of unity so that in some cases one can hardly define the arbitrary constellation of individuals; sometimes they even seem to be yoked together by chance or fate. In his novel Enduring Love (1997), Ian McEwan presents the famous ‘balloon scene’: several individuals thrown together by chance set out to help an unfortunate pilot, who eagerly tries to keep a helium balloon on the ground; the danger is high because the balloon has landed near an escarpment with a young boy remaining inside the basket. Several helpers arrive at the scene, each of them grasping a rope to keep the balloon down. But then a vicious gust of wind makes the balloon rise again, suddenly the men ‘tread air’. Footnote 63 And each of them has to decide within seconds to let loose or to continue to hold on; if no one lets loose, the balloon will come to the ground again, but if only one of them gives up, the balloon will continue to rise. With the exception of a doctor all men decide to save their own lives. The balloon rises quickly, the doctor holds on for some minutes, then falls down to the ground and is killed. When the narrator later analyses this scene he diagnoses the ‘lack of team spirit’ and the absence of a ‘leader’ and summarizes the experience in the words “there was no team”. Footnote 64 McEwan’s scene presents a clearly dysfunctional group.

But there are worse groups than dysfunctional groups. A group without a leader, no team spirit and no feeling of solidarity is easily transformed into a hostile group. Footnote 65 The individual, who normally finds shelter in the community of like-minded people, suddenly faces his ‘fellow beings’ as strangers, not to say enemies. The balloon scene exemplifies the antagonism between selfishness and altruism, illustrating the term well known in ethics: ‘the trolley dilemma’. Fascistic societies interested in the creation of a uniform nation where all mavericks and ‘underdogs’ are systematically ostracized are extremely likely to produce such paradoxical ‘groups’ in their prisonhouses, concentration camps or Gulags. The testimonies of the Holocaust are teeming with reports of ‘group life’ in the camps, which is frequently compared to the forced co-existence of poor souls in Hell. Footnote 66 It is the combination of two archetypes, that of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and that of a ‘living Hell’ that Philip Roth addresses when he interviews Primo Levi and asks him about his fate in the camps:

What’s recounted there reads to me like the story of Robinson Crusoe in Hell, with you, Primo Levi, as Crusoe, wrenching what you need to live from the chaotic residue of a ruthlessly evil island. What struck me there, as throughout the book, was the extent to which thinking contributed to your survival, the thinking of a practical, humane scientific mind. Yours doesn’t seem to me a survival that was determined by either brute biological strength or incredible luck. It was rooted, rather, in your professional character: the man of precision, the controller of experiments who seeks the principle of order; confronted with the evil inversion of everything he values. Granted you were a numbered part in an infernal machine, but a numbered part with a systematic mind that has always to understand. At Auschwitz you tell yourself, ‘I think too much’ to resist: ‘I am too civilized’. But to me the civilized man who thinks too much is inseparable from the survivor. The scientist and the survivor are one. Footnote 67

Levi agrees that he felt like Robinson but insists that he not only fought for his own survival but for that of his sick comrades too. Footnote 68 This correction of Roth’s suggestion is remarkable because Levi here defends the notion that there were traces of humaneness, empathy and charity even in the camps. Although similar observations can be verified in the testimonies of other Holocaust survivors, the prevailing notion one gets from reading their reports is the gradual and universal loss of the feeling of group solidarity. Survival in such a group comes close to the idea of ‘survival against the interest of the other members of the group’. The bitter maxim ‘Every man for himself’ is one of the most essential lessons Elie Wiesel has to learn when he enters the concentration camp, Footnote 69 and—due to similar experiences—Alexander Donat calls the camp a world in which “the doomed devoured each other”. Footnote 70 This harsh observation, which circumscribes the Hobbesian notion of the lupine nature of man ( homo homini lupus est ), could have been meant metaphorically, but some witnesses seem to remember actual instances of cannibalism. Footnote 71 In a certain way, the camps could be looked upon as a sinister microcosm of human life and human survival under extreme conditions. Levi compares them to ‘laboratories’ where human behaviour can be studied minutely, and he emphasizes the camps were a frame for a “gigantic social and biological experiment”, Footnote 72 where the fight for survival can be observed in its most primeval shape. Footnote 73 Some descriptions go even further and cynically call the camp a “perfect Skinner Box”, where human behaviour can be predicted with the precision derived from behaviouristic studies. Footnote 74

Under the fiendish conditions of the life in the camps, the age-old antagonism between instinct and reason, between biological and genetic drives and morality and ethics, selfishness and altruism is extremely exacerbated. The strategic reduction of human beings to their biological essence, sadly described as ‘bare life’ by Levi, transforms a man into a figure Giorgio Agamben has called ‘ homo sacer ’. Footnote 75 The notions of hunger, thirst, coldness, sickness, pain, fatigue and fear, which people develop under ‘normal’ civilized conditions in a society based on principles of empathy and mutual support, assume an unimaginable, extremely dark undertone in the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Even if most survivors eagerly attempted not to allow such a personal deterioration that would transform them into ‘ Muselmänner ’, it was extremely difficult to reserve a rudiment of human dignity under these circumstances. The fascistic politics of depersonalization found its extremity in the camps, and the never-ending sequence of bodily ordeals, biological needs, pain and fear led to a re-evaluation or even utter destruction of ethical systems. Of course, Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, based on the responsibility for the other and his face, Footnote 76 never loses its validity, not even under such harsh conditions, but probably nobody could live up to this or any other ethical system, neither that of Kantian deontology nor that of utilitarianism, because he or she simply did not have the strength or the courage to do so.

One simple precondition for Levinas’s ethics is the implication of his moral maxim that a human face has to be recognized as a ‘human face’, but in the camps everything was systematically planned in order to deprive inmates of their human shape. Pain, hunger, disease, fear and constant ordeal turned personalities into living corpses; only very few were successful in keeping a dignified appearance, some gave up washing themselves any more; their faces were covered by dirt and dust. An extremely execrable stratagem to reduce human dignity to nil was the affront by breaking taboos, what Des Pres calls the “Excremental Assault”: Footnote 77 the unbearable hygienic conditions, the spare water available in the camps, the scarcity of toilets, the absence of toilet paper, the omnipresence of excrements transformed human beings into walking cadavers, exuding a terrible stench. This strategic alienation, which often caused an ensuing self-alienation for the victim, was planned to create an ontological distance between the guardians and the prisoners, and it facilitated the tormenting and killing of the cynically ‘dehumanised humans’ in an appalling way. The Nazis used a cynical form of scatology as an instrument to prevent survival.

This does not mean that exceptions to this ‘normalcy’ of the harsh ethics of survival did not occur, Footnote 78 but they were comparably rare, as everyone can comprehend. The ethics of survival are based on a re-evaluation and ‘reformation’ of coherent ethical systems, coming close to the doctrines of ‘natural law’. As Levi has described it, the values of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are consistently under attack and have to be redefined. Footnote 79 People can ask themselves to what extent it would be possible to stand pain before they would give in to the terrible mechanisms of betraying their personality, their moral and most cherished ethical notions under torture. One can probably not exclude the possibility that ‘one would do anything’ after the infliction of pain exceeds certain limits. Footnote 80

Stealing is certainly regarded as a transgression in most civilized societies, but for the survivor of extreme calamities stealing bread becomes the moral imperative of natural law, for instance redefined as a harmless ‘ Mundraub ’ in the German language. But stealing bread from another starving prisoner reveals its dubious ethical quality and may lead to a feeling of guilt, when the ‘deed’ is remembered later. The ethical dilemmas of prisoners become even more drastic when the other person’s life is at stake, for example, if one may only get the necessary ration of food or to see the next day when one is willing to betray a comrade to the guardians or the ‘ kapos ’. About the gas chambers, camp survivors reported that—when the doors of the deadly room were opened again—the strongest persons could be seen lying on the top of the heaps of corpses because they trampled on the weaker prisoners in their agony of suffocating, creating one of the most ghastly icons of the fight for survival in the face of death. Footnote 81 Nobody can evaluate this situation from a moral or ethical point of view, it is beyond human imagination and human value systems, probably singular in its sheer atrocity. Biologists would certainly refer to the survival automatism of the body, and neuroscience would highlight the fact that the brain—falling back on primeval evolutionary algorithms—in such a moment of distress would incapacitate any residuals of rationality, morality or ethics.

The survival of the fittest revealed itself in various bizarre manifestations sometimes blurring the line between ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’; Harry Haft, for instance, a Jewish boxer from Poland admired for his athletic body, his strength and his skills in the ring, was ordered to fight against other inmates of the camp; if he won, he could count on extra rations of food which secured his survival. Footnote 82 Some of his opponents in the boxing ring did not survive the cruel fight; if they were injured, they were sent to the gas chambers. Footnote 83 Even if it was against his ‘will’, the ‘victim’ Haft was transformed into a tragic ‘perpetrator’. Levi describes some representatives of the category of ‘survivalists’ in the camp, but the term ‘survivalist’, which exudes a special charm in the equivalent German ‘ Überlebenskünstler ’ (with a stress on the ‘art of survival’), has lost any glory in the context of the camps. Levi’s ‘Schepsel’, ‘the engineer Elias Lindzin’, ‘Henry’ and also the ‘strong dwarfish person’ he tells of are representatives of what he calls the ‘primitive state’ of existence, cultivating techniques of deception, primeval self-discipline, simulation of power, Darwinian assimilation and a reckless selfishness bordering on amorality. Footnote 84 Personalities whom, as Levi says, he would not like to see again in his lifetime.

The question of survival and heroism is often discussed, and Des Press reminds his readers that the Holocaust survivors were no heroes:

If by heroism we mean the dramatic defiance of superior individuals, then the age of heroism is gone. If we have in mind glory and grand gesture, the survivor is not a hero. He or she is anyone who manages to stay alive in body and in spirit, enduring dread and hopelessness without the loss of will to carry on in human ways. That is all. Footnote 85

Des Pres’s observation may be right, but—at least when inmates were willing to care for each other, to share their little food with each other, or to support and help someone who was even more needy than themselves—these deeds of benevolence and empathy definitively come close to a kind of moral and ethical heroism under these hellish conditions.

The Dialectics of Survival

The ritual repeats itself in various shapes: the survivors of mining disasters are acclaimed by journalists and congratulated on their ‘luck’; in interviews, the survivor of the attack on the Twin Towers comments on the unimaginable bliss he feels after being rescued and thanks the fire fighters; the survivor of a Tsunami publicly prays to God that his life has been saved; a group of Holocaust survivors is saluted on occasion of a memorial ceremony. On first glance, survival seems to be closely associated with ‘happiness’, ‘luck’, ‘bliss’ and ‘felicity’: the terrible past has been overcome, the future promises happy prospects. But the notion of the ‘happy survivor’, the person relishing in his ‘success’, is deceptive at best. Survival reveals a darker side, a dialectics which renders all idyllic imaginations of a comfortable ‘afterlife’ absurd. It is true, someone who has survived a car accident may have the feeling to be ‘born again’ and his life may prove to be as valuable as it had been before. But especially the survivors of extremely traumatic experiences caused by ‘fellow-men’ often witness a dubious ‘resurrection’ from death, feeling “tarred and feathered for life”, to borrow a memorable expression from Julian Barnes. Footnote 86

In the camps there was an uncanny feeling of being ‘alive and dead’ at the same time; the intense perception of pain, hunger, thirst and coldness was accompanied by the weird experience of time standing still. The a-temporality of the extreme condition inspired the notion of merely being walking corpses, moving carcasses. And it is the fiendish aftermath of extreme trauma that clocks never resume their former trustworthiness after severe injuries; traumatic experiences cannot be overcome without difficulties, they remain an integral part of one’s whole personality, “like a bullet lodged in the soul where no surgery can reach it”. Footnote 87

In traumatic memory the event somehow registers and may actually be relived in the present, at times in a compulsively repetitive manner. It may not be subject to controlled, conscious recall. But it returns in nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety attacks, and other forms of intrusively repetitive behaviour characteristic of an all-compelling frame. Traumatic memory (at least in Freud’s account) may involve belated temporality and a period of latency between a real or fantasized early event and a later one that somehow recalls it and triggers renewed repression or foreclosure and intrusive behaviour. But when the past is controllably relived, it is as if there were no difference between it and the present. Whether or not the past is reenacted or repeated in its precise literality, one feels as if one were back where reliving the event, and distance between here and there, then and now, collapses. Footnote 88

Time sequence is cancelled by traumatic experiences, the past threatens to become an everlasting past, turning the present ‘book of life’ into a palimpsest where the subtext of the past is so strong that it permanently overwrites the actual life story. Flashbacks illuminate the present ‘here’ and ‘now’ with dark colours and transform it into an ephemeral moment behind which the contours of the terrible past emerge with unmitigated intensity. The loss of trust prevails in the ‘new life’:

We emerged from the camp stripped, robbed, emptied out, disoriented—and it was a long time before we were able even to learn the ordinary language of freedom. Still today, incidentally, we speak it with discomfort and without real trust in its validity. Footnote 89

The loss of personal autonomy that followed upon the humiliations in the camps is never remedied. The vulnerability and precariousness of human life, Footnote 90 felt in its extremity in the concentration camps, conquer the rest of the survivor’s existence, inspiring the notion that the life he leads is no longer really ‘his own’. He has to share it with those whom he cannot forget, the ghosts of the past, the spectres of the common experience of suffering. The voices muted in the gas chambers or stifled by the terrible executions are still to be heard, the figures can still be seen wandering forever in their absurd suffering. It would be premature to define this new form of suffering as “concentration camp syndrome”; Footnote 91 it is not so much a symptom of disease but a sign of the will to survive. On the one hand, it may be ‘resentment’ which “nails” every survivor “onto the cross of his ruined past”, Footnote 92 but there is also a strong element of mourning and (unnecessary) ‘guilt’. Elegy accompanies survival with a sad undertone; sometimes as persistent as an unbearable tinnitus, melancholy brings about darker colours of life distorting the clear contours of what other people might regard as ‘reality’. The traumatized survivor sees the real world as a blend of empiric factuality with strong elements of both surrealism and unreality, finding their literary expressions in gothic elements. Footnote 93 The loss of coherence, the tendency towards fragmentarization, disrupture, absence of orientation, disintegration of value systems and logic, represented impressively by postmodern techniques of writing, Footnote 94 frequently become an integral part of the survivor’s new ‘life’.

The title of the German edition of Kluger’s book weiter leben alludes to this dialectics of survival, suggesting interpretations such as ‘I am allowed to live on’ as well as ‘Do I have to live on?’ They manifest the dubious quality of life after a catastrophe. Kluger vividly describes her life-long nervousness and restlessness, the obsession of the drive to leave any place behind in an effort of permanent flight. Footnote 95 In his essayistic reflection on suicide, Améry aphoristically states that the ‘world of a happy person is different from that of an unhappy person’; Footnote 96 any state of ‘happiness’ is infiltrated by traumatic memory and the loss of trust in its persistence. Melancholy and a sense of guilt (even if it only exists in the eyes of the person concerned) form a toxic mixture leading to deep depression, utter despair and sometimes even the wish to commit suicide. The topos of the ‘suicidal Holocaust survivor’, paradoxical at first glance only, reveals its deepest meaning when one reads the life stories of Jean Améry, Bruno Bettelheim, Paul Celan and Primo Levi, Footnote 97 stories of survival abruptly ended by ‘voluntary’ death. The alienation forced on the prisoners of the camps was so intense that—together with the ensuing self-alienation—reality, even the reality after the catastrophe, has become ‘ un-heimlich ’, to use a Freudian term; it refers to the idea of an existential homelessness, which finds a literary expression in Albert Camus’s books, Footnote 98 the feeling of not ‘belonging’ to any place, situation, time or environment any more. The awareness that despite being ‘alive’ one has fallen through the safety nets of the basic sense of trust creates challenges for the rest of one’s life. There may be instances of genuine guilt (who would dare to judge?) but often the feeling of guilt remains vague though persistent; Kluger dedicates a whole paragraph to the topos of the survivor’s guilt:

Survivor guilt does not mean that you think you have no right to live. Speaking for myself, I never believed I should have died because others were killed. I hadn’t done anything bad to anyone. Why should I pay? It’s a question of debt rather than guilt, though these ideas are closely bound together, as in the Lord’s Prayer (“Forgive us our debts”) or in the word debit , and in German the words are related, the one Schuld , guilt, the other Schulden , debt. One remains a debtor and yet doesn’t quite know to whom one owes the debts. One would like to take from the victimizers to give to the victims, but one doesn’t know how. For you owe me—I am a victim—but I owe them—for they are dead, more victim than I. One is debtor and creditor at the same time and is doomed to perform surrogate actions, alternating between giving and demanding: senseless actions in the flickering light or reason. Footnote 99

Kluger finds appropriate words to fend off any suspicion of guilt, but, nevertheless, her further meditations upon survival betray a clear unwellness; the survivor cannot but compare his ‘fate’ with that of his fellow sufferers, and even from them he is separated:

Now comes the problem of this survivor story, as of all such stories: we start writing because we want to tell about the great catastrophe. But since by definition the survivor is alive, the reader inevitably tends to separate, or deduct, this one life, which she has come to know, from the millions who remain anonymous. […] We who escaped do not belong to the community of those victims, my brother among them, whose ghosts are unforgiving. By virtue of survival, we belong with you, who weren’t exposed to the genocidal danger, and we know that there is a black river between us and the true victims. Therefore this is not the story of a Holocaust victim and becomes less and less so as it nears the end. I was with them when they were alive, but now we are separated. Footnote 100

Améry, Levi, Kluger, Bettelheim and Celan were able to express the many agonies of survival by using a more or less literary medium: the essay, testimony, narration, psycholanalysis or poetry, but many survivors did not have access to this form of ‘sublimation’ and transformation of experience into other forms such as words, music, architecture or dance. Trauma is closely connected to silence, often causing an inability to process suffering in form of a ‘text’. Survival is often accompanied by an uncanny situation of silence, lack of words, impossibility to speak, circumscriptions of what usually is addressed as the ‘ Unsagbarkeitstopos ’ (the topos of inex-pressiveness). Footnote 101

The dialectic of survival also includes religious dilemmas. For agnostics and atheists it will probably be absurd to talk about God with regard to what happened during the Holocaust, but from a theological point of view, especially that of a theologian interested in the question of theodicy, the Holocaust will be of the highest concern. For a staunch believer, no matter if he is a Christian, a Jew or a representative of any other religion, evilness is a provocation of the notion of God, because “it cannot be that God stepped out, whether for an hour or an eternity, from world history, for this is the very world that He created and with whose life and destiny He is connected”. Footnote 102 The Holocaust, taking place on what Yehiel Feiner under his pen-name ‘Ka-Tsetnik 135633’ called ‘another planet’, Footnote 103 is the utmost emblem of evilness; in Jewish texts, Adolf Hitler is compared with Haman, the incarnation of evilness in Jewish history, the suffering of men exemplified by the story of Job. Wiesel suffered immensely, when he experienced those “moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams into ashes”; Footnote 104 the concentration camp caused despair in him ( desperatio ):

Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working night and day, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar? Footnote 105

Wiesel, who later adopted a more differentiated attitude towards religion, was not alone in questioning his God, who was ‘hanging from the gallows’ in the concentration camp. Footnote 106 The textual documents written by Jewish theologians in reaction to the Holocaust belong to the most moving testimonies of human beings who reflect the meaningfulness of believing in God after the events of the Holocaust. The scope of reactions ranges from deep piety prepared to believe in God despite everything to the blank confession of atheism; the discussion is extremely complex, but two exemplary texts for the two antagonistic positions of ‘theodicy in the face of the radical evilness of the Holocaust’ shall be included here; the first is by Kalman Shapira, the second by Alexander Donat:

In all honesty, what room is there, God forbid, for doubts or questions? Admittedly, Jews endure suffering or the sort with which we are currently afflicted only every few hundred years. Still, how can we expect or hope to understand these, God’s actions, and then allow our faith to be damaged, God forbid, upon finding that we cannot understand them? If one blade of grass created by God is beyond our understanding, how much more unfathomable is the soul; and if we do not understand a soul, how much less do we understand an angel, and how much less even than this can we understand the mind of God? How could we possibly expect to grasp with our mind what God knows and understands? Footnote 107

I cannot understand how it is possible to believe in a God who allowed 1.5 million children to die in gas chambers and mass graves. No sophistry, rhetoric, or casuistry, no flood of description or poetry, no mysterious or flowery prose can answer this question. The answer is unique and as simple and final as an order to the right or left. There is no other option. Either this is the God of Treblinka—or else there is nothing. My choice is clear: There is nothing. Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits can brush aside ‘Auschwitz theology’ and call it naïve radicalism, but I do not believe in a paranoid, Stalin-like God of Israel or in His ‘chosen people.’ To believe in God after Auschwitz is an insult to our intelligence, true blasphemy, a blow to the deepest feelings of morality. Anarchy rules. […] Precisely because I am a Jew, I deny God. Footnote 108

The Reception of Survival Stories

The survivors almost unanimously state that ‘nothing’ came out of Auschwitz; Footnote 109 it was neither a ‘laboratory’, in which survival could be studied under extreme conditions, nor a ‘lesson’ to be learnt for life, nor an inducement to start believing in God or to change the course of one’s own life after survival. The main judgement is that the experience in the camps was extremely and exclusively grotesque, completely absurd judged from a philosophical vantage point. Perhaps the only way to fill survival with essential meaning, as many survivors claim, is to confront the public as witnesses, to make huge audiences aware of the ghastliness of the catastrophe caused by fanatical human ‘fellow beings’. Many testimonies prove that survivors felt it as their duties to tell their stories so that the suffering of the ‘unlucky victims’ who could not escape the gas chambers could be heard around the world and that it would become impossible for world history to repeat itself. But even in its reception, survival manifests a dialectic character. On the one hand, audiences are interested and eager to know what happened to the survivors, and on the other hand, the witnesses feel that they will never be able to make themselves understood:

So trauma has both centripetal and centrifugal tendencies. It draws one away from the center of group space while at the same time drawing one back. The human chemistry at work here is an odd one, but it has been noted many times before: estrangement becomes the basis for communality, as if persons without homes or citizenship or any other niche in the larger order of things were invited to gather in a quarter set aside for the disenfranchised, a ghetto for the unattached. Footnote 110

The initial interest of the audience is genuine and probably caused by the old tribal impulse to be informed about accidents and catastrophes of any kind; it is a manifestation of curiosity with its inherent principle to transgress any borderline. In a psychological sense, it is more ‘satisfying’ and gives a feeling of security to fellow human beings if they ‘know the worst’ and cannot be surprised by horrible events. Telling stories about survival is also a warning and a mode of giving advice. Footnote 111 In this respect, the narration of the process of other people’s survival can be a vicarious experience, a kind of ‘live model’ characterized by exemplarity, intensification and abstractness, Footnote 112 where individuals and groups give valuable insight into the sociology, psychology, ethics and problems of survival. Furthermore, the representation of catastrophes in any kind of media such as literature, film, footage, art or testimony is always addressed to other ‘survivors’, those who are still living, even if they did not share the past of suffering which is represented in the media. Representations of catastrophes are even responsible for a feeling of ‘pleasure’, which should at no events be confounded with what is defined as ‘ Schadenfreude ’ in German; the audience does not experience pleasure in watching the suffering of others; it owes the pleasant feeling to the awareness of ‘still being alive’, the pleasure of having survived. The complexity of the aesthetic representation of suffering has been illustrated by Blumenberg’s famous scene of the ‘shipwreck with spectator’. Footnote 113 The ship with its crew going down in a stormy sea and observed by a lonely stranger standing on a rock on shore is the illustration of survival and its observation. The observer, of course, represents not only the witness (here the picture would not fit) but the spectator who watches films or the listener who hears what a survivor has to say. For the survivors of extreme ordeals this topos and its graphic nature have to be changed; quite frequently the onshore observers look in the wrong direction, or they turn their backs on what they see in the distance; sometimes the storm is too loud so that the noises are drowned with the crew; sometimes spectators lose their capability to listen at all, or they no longer understand the meaning of a language whose codes remain enigmatic to them. This is exactly what happened to many survivors of the Holocaust: an encounter with unwilling recipients. Indifference, lack of interest, consternation or even the feeling of being threatened or attacked by survival stories are part of the reception history. Kluger summarizes this experience:

We survivors reminded the population through our mere existence of what had happened, and what they and their people had done. Perhaps they were afraid of our revenge, or they thought we were like dogs that have been regularly beaten and can only snarl and bite. If you hadn’t been there yourself, you could make believe that only criminals had survived the camps or those who had been brutalized while they were incarcerated. Never mind that this view was in direct contradiction to the equally widespread opinion that the camps couldn’t have been all that bad: witness how many survivors we (poor Germans) now have. Footnote 114

Like Kluger, who to no avail tried to inform her aunt about her experiences in the camp, Haft felt completely misunderstood by his new American neighbours and friends. Language had lost its function to serve as a bridge between the individual and its new group. With deeply melancholic cynicism, Améry remarked: “What dehumanized me has become a commodity, which I offer for sale”. Footnote 115 He feels extremely violated by the recommendation of the French Jewish scholar André Neher, who recommended “emotional ascetisms” to the survivors. Footnote 116

Survival After the End of the Anthropocene

The plethora of testimonies written in the wake of the Holocaust offer the opportunity of studying the calamities of individual survival, the survival of groups and the survival of individuals in the group or against and despite of a ‘group’ as under a concave mirror. The recurrent theme of the reports about the survivors’ experiences is the gradual loss of autonomy, which—even after liberation—could never be completely restored. The loss of the possibility to control one’s own life, to decide what to do, where to go and what to believe in were central aspects of the strategic dehumanization and humiliation of prisoners in the camps.

The issue of survival does not lose its significance after the end of the Holocaust, the abolishment of the Gulags or the destruction of detention centres. Footnote 117 Even in a modern society of the Western world, where citizens can ‘live’ in a comparably safe environment, survival will always remain an important subject; the vulnerability of life in general, and human life in particular, will probably never render the issue obsolete. Contemporary critics, however, do not tire to draw attention to the fact that the relative safety of modern life comes at a high price. It is precisely the doctrine of neoliberalism that criticizes a principle, Footnote 118 vital for survival under the harsh conditions of fascism: resilience. From the neoliberalistic point of view, resilience is not really “the bedrock of positive mental health”, Footnote 119 which is the main reason for a survivor to lead a happy life; it rather reveals its dark potential: it gradually and perfidiously undermines and then completely destroys autonomy. Footnote 120 If the optimistic belief in the autonomous control of one’s own life and one’s environment was an essential concomitant of Enlightenment philosophy, neoliberalism describes the gradual loss of this philosophical achievement. Summarized, the argument reads like this: due to the prospects of economic growth and gain, the state gives a comparably high degree of (economic) ‘liberty’ to its subjects but simultaneously shifts the responsibility for any calamities to the individual who is coerced to shoulder the responsibility for his own survival; the failure of survival is blamed on the individual because it has miscalculated a specific situation. Footnote 121 By following this stratagem, the state ‘produces’ well-adapted political subjects, drilled to put up with any adversities and too inert to fight against politics:

The making of resilient subjects and societies fit for neoliberalism by agencies of sustainable development is based upon a degradation of the political capacities of human beings far more subtle than that achieved in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But the enthusiasm with which ideologies of sustainable development are turning resilience into an ‘imperative’ is nevertheless comparable with that of the SS guards who also aimed ‘to speed up the processes of adaptive learning’ among those Jews and other populations in their charge by convincing them of the futility of resistance. Footnote 122

Although after a discussion of the ordeal brought about by the Holocaust every critic would be well advised not to use that catastrophe as an object of comparison, the implication of the argument above is clear. It is the notion that neoliberalism, in the long run, will be inimical to survival. A further implication of the criticism of neoliberalism is the satirical view of the central economical interest in contemporary life, an interest that is exclusively focused on the ‘interest’ of human beings.

Usually discussions about survival are based on the tacit assumption that the theme of survival pivots around one centre: the human being. As obvious as this seems to be, it is far from self-evident. The last decades have witnessed a paradigm shift of looking at the world: vulnerability has become much more visible and a growing preparedness to a turn to affect emerges in academic theory; Footnote 123 furthermore, the paradigm of the anthropocene, which supports all kinds of anthropocentric ideologies, is about to end, and a new awareness of life and survival are to be seen. Survival no longer concerns human beings alone; a new sensitivity for the ‘rights’ of animals are to be felt everywhere. The theme of survival is widened now, taking into consideration the survival of animal species, but also the criticism of the consummation of meat causing the death of cattle and poultry. Due to the climate crisis and the public protest it has provoked, the movement ‘Fridays for Future’, initiated by Greta Thunberg, it is also ‘nature’ and the ‘earth’ whose survival has now been put on a global agenda. Footnote 124 These new conditions and redefinitions of survival would present enough objects of research for future conferences and symposia, but this brief essayistic survey of the survival theme should not come to an end without at least mentioning a new category of survival: the survival of human beings in a century deeply characterized by the ‘digital revolution’. For the first time in history, humanity, the animal rationale , has to share its prominent position with other ‘creatures’ who may claim to be as intelligent, better, much more intelligent than itself. The future may well show that the new mode of human survival will rest on a balanced power relationship between human beings and intelligent robots, androids, who will render human work, human learning, human planning and human thinking more and more obsolete. In a humorous, but nevertheless, dystopian novel, Ian McEwan has given a foretaste of the battle of the ‘survival of the fittest’ between humanity and androids in his novel Machines like Me (2019). The survival of natural catastrophes is difficult but possible; the new challenge for survivors could be a group of antagonists, created by humans but more intelligent, more powerful and more dangerous than they themselves could ever become. ‘Survival’ might assume a new meaning, because—due to the future successes of science in general and medicine in particular—it might be possible to conquer death. Footnote 125 The need to develop survival strategies of mankind in the ‘digital age’ will become more and more urgent in the future.

Chapter Summaries

The chapters in this book are divided into three units. The first part centres on the notion of survival and the group. It opens with a chapter by Jean-Michel Ganteau, who addresses the complex affiliations between suffering, survival, testimony, elegy and the emerging culture of the ‘ethics of care’. Although he admits that the issue of survival is closely connected with the Shoah, his main focus lies on the analysis of survival in our contemporary world, exemplarily illustrated in Jon McGregor’s novel Even the Dogs . Building on research by—among others—Dori Laub, Judith Butler, Jean François Lyotard and Didi-Huberman, he confirms their notions that traumatic events are beyond the understanding of the survivor himself. In a certain way, fiction offers the chance to fill this hole; in fiction, it is permissible to include surrealistic elements, for instance the description of ghosts and spectrality, themselves emblems of traumatic obsession. Ganteau next discusses the prevalence of the elegiac in contemporary survival stories and accentuates the fact that contemporary elegies still consist of descriptions and lamentations, but that they have lost their third distinctive characteristic feature: consolation. In Even the Dogs , this ‘modern’ mode of ‘melancholic elegy without consolation’ is clearly to be seen. McGregor’s protagonists are outsiders, ‘losers’, underprivileged people, marginalized by society. Describing the sad death of the central figure, Robert, a deeply traumatized war veteran, the novel analyses survival in a hostile contemporary world. Ganteau shows that McGregor’s decision to employ a ‘spectral chorus’ as a narrative device allows him to describe traumatic experiences that could not be represented by more traditional forms of narration; the chorus becomes the superstes of the victim. Bodies and voices are separated in this story; the surreal collective narrator is present and yet absent, close and distanced, dead and alive simultaneously; narration becomes a kind of new mode of ‘meta-physical’ representation of suffering and trauma. This experimental novel, as Ganteau shows, is an analysis of the suffering of invisible people in modern society. For Ganteau, McGregor’s novel is a typical example of the emerging culture of care and of the ethics of alterity, since McGregor intends to train his readers to develop an intensified awareness of the suffering of invisible human beings.

Like Ganteau, Vanessa Guignery accentuates the close affiliations between the theme of ‘survival’ and the context of the Shoah, and like him, she also shifts the focus from the ‘singularity’ of suffering during the Holocaust to a broader analysis of survival as a universal characteristic feature of mankind. Harking back on survival testimonies written by Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, Elie Wiesel and Ella Ligen, she confirms the tragic interrelation between survival, guilt and shame, and she shares the deeply pessimistic insight that survival is frequently based on a radical enforcement of ruthless egotism which abandons any ethical principles, but her in-depth analyses of selected novels by Julian Barnes and Caryl Phillips eventually reveal a more optimistic view of survival. Both Barnes and Phillips present a series of stories in which the suffering of individuals is described, but where they simultaneously manifest the inherent interconnectedness of all these single stories by integrating recurring echoes, patterns, motifs, themes, images and especially metaphors. Using ‘shipwreck’ as a universal existential metaphor in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters , Barnes analyses the implications of suffering and survival in various historical periods from Noah’s Arc to the Titanic disaster, from the events on the Achille Lauro to the MS St Louis. In three novels, Higher Ground , The Nature of Blood and Crossing the River , Phillips links the fates of the sufferers together by a system of ‘parallel periodization’, which transcends history and time and establishes a strong net of time-transcending solidarity and resilience. Phillips’s novels can be interpreted as iconographic illustrations of Michael Rothberg’s concept of the rhizomatic ‘knots of a collective and cultural memory’, highly dependant on acts of story telling. Narration itself, it becomes clear, is a way of survival, and a chance to inspire the feeling of a trans-historical, cross-cultural, cross-difference solidarity between all human beings thus contributing to the emerging culture of a new visibility of vulnerability and a new awareness of resilience, empathy and the ethics of care in our time. In the optimistic conclusion of her chapter, Guignery suggests the possibility of a trans-traumatic society based on the principle of universal solidarity.

Janet Wilson’s contribution to this volume, Chap. 4 , verifies the topicality of the issue of ‘survival’ in the twenty-first century. She shows to what degree the contemporary phenomena of flight, migration and asylum seeking forced by poverty, oppression or war can be interpreted as manifestations of survival. Focusing on refugee writing, on the stories told by the ‘most marginalised of all diaspora populations’, she draws attention to the problems inherent in the ‘ethics of representation’. Refugees are either invisible, or they become ‘objects’ of overexposure, especially in media reports. Wilson shows the importance of giving refugees their own voice and of listening to them, but even the act of ‘giving a voice’ can be interpreted as a kind of neo-colonial mode of exerting inappropriate power. Using three literary examples, Wilson explores both the nature and potential impact of refugee writing. The first example, Abu Bakr Khaal’s poetic novel African Titanics , illustrates Judith Butler’s ideas of the precariousness of life and of the universal validity of co-vulnerability and of co-responsibility. As an Eritrean migrant, Khaal enriches his testimony of the exodus with fictional elements, poetry and especially songs, stories and legends from his cultural heritage. Migration to him appears like a pandemic, like a huge wave, even like sorcery putting a black spell on many Africans, some of them doomed to die during the attempt to survive. Refugee Tales I, II and III , an anthology of refugee texts, offer a kind of literary ventriloquism by which the experiences of others are presented. Using Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a frame, they collect the stories of anonymous narrators known only by their roles. The choice of Chaucer’s anthology as a kind of ‘imaginary homeland’ proves the pro-active stance of this literary project, intentionally giving a ‘national space’ to rootless immigrants. Refugee Tales , however, also reveals the ‘crisis of representation’, since the co-producers, ghostwriters and translators may be responsible for overwriting and thus distorting the original stories. The third example, the memoir No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison by the Kurdish author Behrouz Boochani, fuses testimony and fiction and combines the realistic description of the inhuman practices in the detention camps established for refugees by the Australian government with literary texts reminiscent of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus. Boochani’s impressive memoir exposes the violence and humiliations witnessed in the Australian detention camps as a mixture of racism, sexism and colonialism. Boochani’s poetic depictions of nature and the natural life which he seeks out in rare moments of self-chosen isolation and loneliness prove the energy nature has: in this natural space he can grow his Kurdish roots again, reanimate the richness of his culture and, by finding his identity again, develop strong strategies of survival, especially resilience. All three examples analysed by Wilson reveal the strong impact refugee writing may have on official government policies of immigration and asylum law since all of them are powerful critiques of exclusion.

The first section closes with a chapter by Susanne Gruss, whose article brings together questions of cultural and personal trauma with matters of neo-slave narratives. Taking as her case study Sara Collin’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2019), a novel that both builds on the historical eighteenth-century tradition of slave narratives and projects that form into the contemporary conventions of neo-historical writing, Gruss concentrates on questions of gendered and racial identities. Well connected to contemporary discussions in Britain about how the country did and maybe should deal with its colonial past and the legacy of racist ideologies, the novel actively toys with its literary precursors, inviting its readers to engage, intertextually, with both the history of race politics and the contemporary discussions about intersectional forms of aesthetic representation. The trauma resulting from colonial forms of oppression is placed in contrast with feminist forms of writing back, creating in the novel a kaleidoscope of voices that, far from providing a singular and finite account of the life and times of Frannie Langton, invites readers to participate in the tribulations that the protagonist had to go through, making of her own personal story of survival simultaneously a form of record that testifies to the relationship between literature and cultural politics. Employing various forms of narrative unreliability, as Gruss demonstrates, the text challenges readers to remain doubtful about any form of historiography, revealing that memories of survival routinely suffer from the intensity of emotional duress. Fragmentation, consequently, becomes a major form of representation, yet remains, at least implicitly, directed at particular contemporary readers.

The chapters in the second part share an interest in survival and the individual. Rudolf Freiburg analyses physical, psychological and aesthetic aspects of survival under the harsh conditions of a totalitarian regime. Julian Barnes, who in almost all his works tells highly complex stories of survival enriched with ethical implications, presents a partly documentary, partly fictional description of Dmitri Dmitrijewitsch Shostakovich’s suffering under Stalin. Freiburg interprets Barnes’s novel as a veritable allegory of survival. Barnes is a master of condensing highly complex situations into unforgettable images reminiscent of modernist epiphanies. The introductory scene presenting an amputated warrior who desperately moves around on the platform on a shabby trolley is such an epiphany, an appropriate ‘emblem of survival’, in general, and of Shostakovich’s survival, in particular. Survival comes at a price, and Freiburg analyses how in a terrible process of vivisection, Shostakovich is more or less amputated before the reader’s eye. The minimalistic style Barnes uses for this novel creates a distance between Shostakovich’s world and that of the recipient, but it also represents the utter greyness of life under Stalin, when physical survival is a daily challenge, a constant fight against poverty, hunger, coldness, lack of gas and electricity, unemployment and disease. On the one hand, Shostakovich’s survival is a heroic act, but his survival is also overshadowed by cowardice, turning him, as Barnes accentuates himself, into a ‘heroic coward’ or a ‘cowardly hero’. The clash between art and power, allegorically described by Barnes, causes the gradual disintegration of Shostakovich’s personality. After Stalin publicly condemned Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk , Shostakovich was officially transformed into an ‘enemy of the people’. The incessant psychological stress turned Shostakovich into a traumatized person living in constant fear. Barnes presents a second unforgettable image of Shostakovich’s mental state: the composer is described as a man waiting in front of an elevator with his suitcase packed. Freiburg interprets the dynamics of Shostakovich’s survival as a sequence of increasing humiliations and the collapse of ethical values: Shostakovich’s is compelled to betray his friends and, even worse, his aesthetic ideal, the music of Igor Stravinsky. The exploration of Barnes’s novel illustrates the paradoxical notion of the ‘unhappy survivor’, the oxymoron of a person still ‘alive’ but ‘dead’ at the same time. With the portrait of Shostakovich as a survivor who wishes his life away, and even more tragic, who never wants to be born again, Barnes sheds some rather pessimistic light on the theme of survival. But, and this is the positive final outcome of the novel, Barnes also suggests that the clash between art and power does not really result in the survival of power and the extinction of art. On the contrary, in the end, it is rather art that survives, as Shostakovich has proven with his immortal music.

Susana Onega addresses both the politics and dynamics of survival in the story of the Luxtons, who deteriorated from a proud rural family into a group of traumatized individuals haunted by the past. Swift’s story illustrates the concept of the contemporary ‘wound culture’ described by Mark Seltzer. By interrelating world-wide traumatic incidences, as the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the mad cow disease in England in the 1980s and 1990s, with the history of one English family, Swift shows how political events may trigger a concatenation of tragedies in the private world. Onega interprets Jack Luxton’s journey from Lookout to Oxfordshire, where he intends to attend the ‘Repatriation Ceremony’ for his younger brother Tom, who had been ‘killed on active duty’ in Iraq, as a mental journey into his past. His family history reveals itself as a sad narrative of vulnerability and as a sequence of losses. Referring to research by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Onega explores the various reasons that turn these traumatic experiences into even worse ‘objective correlates’ deeply ‘buried alive’ in the souls of each victim, from where they resurrect as ‘ghosts’. Due to the psychological laws of ‘belatedness’, they develop a kind of dark energy and cause the ‘survivors’ to suffer from life-long mourning and vitriolic qualms concerning the meaning of existence in general. Among the many causes which exacerbate the suffering of the victims are staunch concepts of manhood, which keep Jack and Tom from expressing their emotions, but also misinterpretations of episodes and misunderstanding of words, a general lack of communication and a continuous absence of empathy. Onega shows that by using a complex narrative structure reminiscent of a mental palimpsest, by composing a polyphony of diverse voices and by merging past, present and future together, Swift adumbrates the a-temporality and ubiquity of traumatic experiences, which may invade the present moment at any time and render survival almost impossible. Suicide seems to be the only solution to overcome Jack’s existential crisis. Although the novel clearly represents what Jean-Michel Ganteau has identified as ‘the prevailing elegiac mode of contemporary culture’, where lamentation frequently lacks any consolation, Wish You Were Here at least offers a perhaps more optimistic solution: survival is possible; it can be attained once the toxic feelings of guilt, neglect, despair and (narcissistic) melancholy are transformed into resilience, social empathy and the ethics of care.

A different sense of resilience appears in Sibylle Baumbach’s chapter on dementia narratives. Starting with an ethical framing of how readers position themselves vis-à-vis narratives of illness and suffering, the chapter critically questions to what extent any reading of a narrative of illness and suffering can claim an ethical platform. This challenge also surfaces in narratives that deal with people whose lives are increasingly enmeshed in forms of oblivion and forgetting. Baumbach carefully addresses how a diagnosis affects both the patients and also those closest to them, requiring both groups to relate to forms of surviving in a way that accepts the finality of the diagnosis and the inevitability that results from the fact that, in this particular case, any survival that believes in a sense of continuity of existence is impossible. As she shows in her discussion of works by authors like Thomas DeBaggio and Michael Ignatieff, survival becomes a commitment to others: the patient diagnosed with dementia henceforth lives for others and in their memory. The forms of writing confront readers directly with the fragmentary nature both of memory and of the narratives that result from this state of mind. Making of survival what Baumbach calls ‘a social act’ that actively triggers the attention of readers, surviving becomes a task projected on to family members and, in the case of literary forms of representation, on the readers trying to piece together a life from the disintegration of its protagonist, struggling with remembering and challenged by social conventions of selfhood and identity that ill fit the requirements and reality of people who suffer from dementia.

In Chap. 9 , Gerd Bayer addresses the question of survival as it features in the memoir of British writer Jenny Diski. Her last book, In Gratitude , serves both as a cancer memoir, written while the author was undergoing treatment for a terminal illness, and as a reckoning with an earlier moment in the writer’s life, when she moved as a teenager into Doris Lessing’s household, following an extensive period of serious mental health issues. As Diski reflects on both these life-defining moments in her life, she discusses both the implications of living with a highly successful author when she was nurturing her own ambitions of becoming a writer and the challenges anybody faces when confronted in a non-negotiable manner with one’s own mortality. Drawing on Derrida’s reflections about the intellectual legacies that sometimes live on beyond the demise of the author and on Paul Ricoeur’s differentiations between the biographical versions of identity that allow him to ruminate about an experience of ‘oneself as another’, Bayer presents Diski as torn between a sense of gratitude that goes back to her early survival as a highly troubled teenager and the resulting guilt that grew from the relationship she developed with her foster family. In both situations, Diski apparently felt drawn to the force of literature as an art-form and thus as a tool for survival, or nachleben , that can provide comfort and a form of atonement in moments of retroactive regret.

Turning from literary survival and printed sources to cinematic works, Pat Brereton’s chapter closes this section by providing a further shift in that it turns the attention to the interaction between humans and the rest of the planet. Drawing on discussions that stem from the environmental humanities, from ecocriticism and from ethical approaches to nature, Brereton frames his discussion of two recent films, I am Legend and The Ravenant , with a contextualization of cinema as a major source of how audiences learn about nature and the environment, contributing to their development of an ethical sense of responsibility for ecological issues. The setting of a post-apocalyptic New York provides I am Legend with the backdrop for its tale of survival that, so Brereton contends, pits personal perseverance against a pandemic scenario of zombies attacking the sole survivor of a medical experiment run bad. Both a trained soldier and scientist, the film’s protagonist is framed as a hero defending family narratives and an American work ethic built around duty. With the non-human environment created as the ultimate threat, the film celebrates human strength of character while, at the same time, exacerbating the schism between humanity and the natural world. Brereton demonstrates how The Ravenant , while celebrating the cinematic qualities of highly picturesque and nevertheless wildly threatening natural landscapes alongside animal foes, focuses on the trials and tribulations that Leonardo DiCaprio, the lead actor, undergoes. Nature becomes a mere backdrop, yet both films contribute significantly to a public discourse about nature and the environment and as such, Brereton concludes, exist as elements in the development of an ecological consciousness as part of a general sense of mankind’s attitude towards nature.

The final section of this chapter collection is built around one of the central themes of the ethics of survival, the legacy of the Holocaust. One of the early literary publications in this context was Primo Levi’s famous book Se questo é un uomo . In the American translation, the title was changed into Survival in Auschwitz ; this problematic ‘emendation’ caused by the translator is the vantage point of Maria Anna Mariani’s chapter. Whereas the original Italian title suggests a deep philosophical reflection on the ‘nature of man’ and the problematic ethics of survival that may collide with the dignity of a person, the American version rather focuses on survival as a special technique human beings can be proud of. As the publishers confessed, the new title was chosen for commercial reasons, transforming and probably perverting the theme of Holocaust survival into a commodity, a veritable ‘disgrace’, as Hayden White judged in a review. Referring to Terrence Des Pres and Christopher Lasch, Mariani describes the semantics of the word ‘survival’ in the 1980s, when it was popular to describe even trivial problems as ‘matters of life and death’, and everyday life as a ‘domestic concentration camp’ thus contributing to the ‘deification of survival’: one can ‘learn’ how to survive even by listening to extreme stories told by Holocaust survivors. The ensuing close reading of Levi’s testimony explains why the American publisher took it for a kind of ‘survival guide’. Levi’s testimony shows the significance of the ‘here and now’ for the act of survival, the actual task of living yet another hour, even if the price for survival is extremely high. In the camps, Levi may have been able to preserve some ‘personal virtues’ such as empathy and solidarity, but yet the price for survival comes close to the total collapse of human dignity, authenticity and autonomy, thus turning an individual into the mere incarnation of a ‘faceless need’ to eat, drink and sleep. Mariani illustrates this process by accentuating the replacement of the first personal pronoun I by we in Levi’s text. The individual voice is lost, it gets dissolved and fuses with a choir, not unlike that described by Ganteau in his chapter on Jon McGregor’s novel Even the Dogs . Only the doomed man whose public hanging by the Nazis is described by Levi, and his desperate yet autonomous final cry, reclaims human autonomy. Levi’s book is a description of life ‘beyond individuality’, of existence as an ‘impersonal neutral need’ to live on. Levi invites the reader to understand a singular world of evilness simultaneously warning him against judging this world, and his strongest weapon is the device of ‘imagination’. He makes the reader aware that he himself could have been the one to face the ethical dilemmas of having to make toxic decisions concerning life and death, using the logic of the traditional fable, the message is clear: de te fabula . At the end of her chapter, Mariani mitigates her criticism of the title chosen by the American editors of Levi’s book, conceding that it is more appropriate than one thought, ending her chapter nevertheless by suggesting yet another title.

Erin McGlothlin also takes an interest in the reception of Holocaust literature, albeit with a shift of interest to the classroom. Her chapter concentrates on the readerly moment of reception during which the protagonist in a Holocaust narrative is finally rescued from the mortal danger of the extermination camps. Developing her argument from her own experience in the classroom, teaching such texts, McGlothlin discusses this moment as a “whew” effect, when readers noticeably communicate a sense of relief. Differentiating her approach from classical notions of catharsis, she shows how generic and paratextual features contribute significantly, albeit usually quite unconsciously, to how readers approach a survivor memoir in terms of the ethical investment that sees them build empathy and attachment around a protagonist who, precisely by surviving the Holocaust, can hardly serve as a representative figure of this particular historical event. Authors who work in this genre are well aware of how readers participate emotionally in the positive outcome of these narratives and the concomitant reversal of historical facts, and McGlothlin even discusses an example in Ruth Kluger’s writing that appears to address directly an American audience prone to engage in such a redemptive reading of Holocaust biographies. While for survivors the moment of survival may only rarely have felt like a personal triumph, the “whew” effect as found amongst non-scholarly readers seems to suggest that, in particular with narratives of narrowly surviving, there is a readerly need for closure that provides a positive sense of an ending.

Brad Prager’s chapter brings together literary and cinematic forms of Holocaust commemoration, focussing on two filmic representations that feature German writer Ruth Kluger. The complex relationship between verbal representations of the Holocaust has been variously discussed in the context of a general inability to speak about the horrors of the camp but also in light of the importance that forms of testimony have taken on, increasingly also in the shape of video testimonies that, as Prager shows, are being put together in various libraries and archives. With the lack of stability that attaches to all forms of testimony, the recorded voices of survivors that appear in filmed testimonies are prone to the same limitations that attach to other forms of representation and as such are not fully capable of recreating the horrors and violence of the Holocaust. The two films by Erwin Leiser and Thomas Mitscherlich frame the interview settings that feature Kluger with edited and contextualized footage from historical sources, including filmed footage of atrocities. The two films thus create representations that supplement their presented stories with material that brings onto the screen those who did not live to tell about their ordeals. The films speak for those who did not live to tell. While films can thus present forms of truth via testimony, the question remains whether reality ever speaks through visual footage. While Leiser, in Prager’s analysis, sets out to counter Holocaust deniers, Mitscherlich takes a different approach in that he aims to address feelings of responsibility in German viewers. With survival discussed as a ‘desire to write’, the two films as well as Kluger’s writing are presented as highly invested in matters of figuration, where the force of literalness remains limited, yet where through her choice of language Kluger aspired to affect her readers as forcefully as some atrocity images do.

Closing this volume, Sue Vice in her chapter relates matters of survival to the principle of rescue. By looking at outtakes from Claude Lanzmann’s filmed material for his Shoah , Vice has identified four interviews with witnesses who all were related to various efforts to organize and implement forms of rescue and intervention on behalf of the concentration camp inmates. In trying to bring about the survival of the interned Jewish populations, the four individuals whose testimonies are under scrutiny in this chapter were all involved with the War Refugee Board, a US agency. By juxtaposing the footage with four people whose involvement and investment in the rescue effort appears to have worked not always in full accord with each other, Vice reveals the complexity involved in the political discussions during World War II when it came to create a political will to intervene in the mass killings in Nazi Germany. The footage makes clear that with respect to the matter of survival, each individual had to make difficult choices, and each individual will be more or less willing to discuss these decisions with historical hindsight. The chapter reveals how a communal sense of testimony can develop from collating individual video interviews, how individual perspectives provide a glimpse into the complexities of a particular historical scenario. Financial considerations, bureaucracy and red tape are frequently shown to have created obstacles to a clear and forceful intervention, but so was a lack of political will to intervene that betrays anti-Semitic overtones. By demonstrating how diverse the four witnesses acted and are willing to remember their involvement during this rescue effort, Vice reveals how ‘ Realpolitik ’ intervenes even when the survival of scores of people is at stake. Her chapter thus contributes a significant element to the communal way of how the trauma of the Holocaust is and will be remembered.

Dawkins ( 1989 , 20).

Wilson ( 1976 , 562).

Spencer ( 1884 , 444). This èlan vital , however, should be imagined as a force devoid of any teleological meaning; see Des Pres ( 1976 , 193–194).

See Rosenfield ( 1968 ).

In this book the focus of most analyses will lie on the survival of ‘human’ individuals and partly on that of ‘mankind’.

Of course, this does not concern atheists; see Julian Barnes’s humorous remark in Nothing to be Frightened of on the “fury of the resurrected atheist” ( 2008 , 64).

Elliott ( 2018 , 16).

Elliott ( 2018 , 3).

Elliott ( 2018 , 1).

See Burgess ( 1986 , 6).

See Maechler ( 2001 ).

Kluger ( 2001 , 64).

Kluger ( 2001 , 184–185).

See Kilby ( 2002 ).

Seen in this context, it is precisely the Holocaust which rendered witnessing almost impossible; see Laub ( 1995 , 65).

LaCapra ( 2001 , 42).

Caruth ( 1995 , 4–5).

See Ganteau and Onega ( 2017 , 5).

These two ‘failures’ are discussed by Caruth ( 2003 , 60) and by Gilmore ( 2001 , 6).

See, for example, Wiesel ( 2006 , viii), who in his “Preface” to Night (vii–xv), asks himself why he tells the story of his suffering and comes to the conclusion: “However, having survived, I needed to give some meaning to my survival.”

See Laub ( 1992a , 85).

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Freiburg, R., Bayer, G. (2021). Survival: An Introductory Essay. In: Freiburg, R., Bayer, G. (eds) The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_1

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Theme of Survival in Literature Essay Example

Survival can be seen as a hero saving all mankind or simply just a regular person only trying to see the light of the next day. Survival is something that people need every day, only some know how to manage and use it to push themselves. The Lord of the Flies, The Sniper, and The Most Dangerous Game all show that having the will to live is key to survival.

Ralph in the Lord of the Flies portrays the will to live by continuing to try to stay civilized. When Jack and his hunters let the fire out, Ralph said, “We’ve got to start the fire again,” (115 Golding). After the stranded schoolboys let the fire go out, Ralph wants to rebuild the fire immediately, but the other boys continued with their fun and games. As Jack is starting to go savage, he says, “We hunt and feast and have fun. If you want to join my tribe, come and see us,” (140 Golding). Jack, one of Ralph’s greatest enemies on the island, takes advantage of almost every single boy. Jack wants to make the boys go against Ralph and have “fun.” At the end of the Lord of the Flies, Ralph is the only one who had this longing to survive, which is why most of the boys survived because of him.

In The Most Dangerous Game, Rainsford takes advantage of his fear to push him to survive. Rainsford is a very mentally strong character that portrays what surviving takes. According to the author, “His mind worked frantically. He thought of a native trick he learned in Uganda,” (199 Connell). Most people under pressure end up losing common sense and do something arrogant, but Rainsford does the complete opposite. He makes use of this terrible feeling called fear to push him to survive the deadly game. In paragraph 202… “Nerve, nerve, nerve!” he panted as he dashed along,” (Connell). Rainsford continues to push himself throughout his deadly adventure. Rainsford would have died if he did not have this instinct to live and work with his fears.

The main character in The Sniper must use his quick decisions to determine his survival. The Sniper is a very powerful character that has gotten so used to the way war impacts a soldier every day, that it is instinct. According to the author, “A man’s head and shoulders appeared looking toward the sniper. The sniper raised his rifle and fired,” (47-48 O’Flaherty). Before the Sniper pulls the trigger that will end a person’s life, he has no second thoughts, no “what ifs” come across his mind, just that he must survive. In paragraph 79… “Mourning must not find him wounded on the roof,” (79 O’Flaherty). The main character has this instinct that he must fulfill, he must survive. The Sniper embraces this instinct that does help him survive but leaves him alone with the death of his victims.

The Lord of the Flies, The Sniper, and The Most Dangerous Game all show that taking advantage of their instinct is necessary to survive. All the characters use this instinct even though they don’t process the logic behind it. The characters don’t even have to concur about what they need to do, they just know they must live. The representation the stories show us is that we all have this instinct, it just depends on how we control and use it.

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How to Write an Essay on Survival

Sara volmering.

Survival typically refers to enduring circumstances or situations that may challenge a person's well-being and life, or to persevering through trials and hardships. Natural disasters, violent conflicts, war and even economic hardships can create the need for survival skills. Essays on survival can be written from many angles, but no matter which angle he or she takes, the writer should identify the elements needed to survive the situation that is being examined.

Explore this article

Preparation
Decide if the essay
Write a thesis statement
Conduct research on your topic
Create an outline for the essay
Introduce your topic and thesis statement
Use the body paragraphs
Discuss counter-arguments for your thesis
Conclude the essay
A bibliography

1 Preparation

2 decide if the essay.

Decide if the essay will be an analysis of a true survival story or a survival guide for a specific situation. This will dictate the set of circumstances about which you'll write.

3 Write a thesis statement

Write a thesis statement to narrow your topic and to summarize what the essay will prove.

4 Conduct research on your topic

Conduct research on your topic. Consider the impact of the climate, geography, social and political problems, and regional wildlife have on your topic. Find true survival stories with similar circumstances to your problem. Investigate existing resources like survival guides and government resources.

5 Create an outline for the essay

Create an outline for the essay. Organize your ideas by listing them in order from most important to least important. Group similar or supportive ideas together, and take note of any research that will support the arguments.

7 Introduce your topic and thesis statement

Introduce your topic and thesis statement in the first paragraph.

8 Use the body paragraphs

Use the body paragraphs to support your thesis statement. Describe the landscape the essay focuses on, including details of the weather, terrain, food and water sources and describe potential dangers. Analyze true survival stories that relate to your topic, focusing on what actions the people took, or should take, and the outcomes of those actions.

9 Discuss counter-arguments for your thesis

Discuss counter-arguments for your thesis, if any exist. This might include alternative survival techniques or stories from survivors who have put forth different information. Prove to the reader why your thesis is correct by using your supportive evidence.

10 Conclude the essay

Conclude the essay by restating your thesis and referencing the arguments and research that is presented in the essay.

11 A bibliography

Write a bibliography or works cited page for any research used in the essay according to your instructor's guidelines.

Record the citation information for any sources you use in your essay while you are conducting research.
Provide in-text citations for direct quotes or paraphrased information or passages.
Proofread the essay before submitting.
1 Purde OWL: Prewriting; Allen Brizee; April 2010

About the Author

Sara Volmering started writing in 2007. She has contributed film reviews and human-interest stories to the "Western Herald," her university newspaper. Volmering holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Western Michigan University.

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The Theme of Survival in "Hatchet" by Gary Paulsen

Paulsen, G. (1987). Hatchet. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.
McGuire, M. P. (1998). The Hatchet Companion. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.
Mikkelsen, N. (2004). Teaching Ethics Through Novels: A Study of Hatchet and Touching Spirit Bear. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 48(6), 500-510.
Thompson, P. (2013). Using YA Literature to Teach Conflict Resolution Strategies: An Analysis of Hatchet and Touching Spirit Bear. Journal of Educational Research and Practice, 3(2), 85-96.
Graves, R. (2014). The Importance of Mentorship in Hatchet. Journal of Literature and Art Studies, 4(6), 450-456.
Jackson, D. (2015). Using Young Adult Literature to Teach Characterization: A Study of Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet. Journal of Literature and Art Studies, 5(3), 225-231.
Hennessy, M. (2017). Literature for Today's Young Adults (10th ed.). New York: Pearson.

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Theme of Survival in Literature Essay Example

Related Samples

How to Write an Essay on Survival

Explore this article

1 Preparation

3 Write a thesis statement

4 Conduct research on your topic

5 Create an outline for the essay

7 Introduce your topic and thesis statement

8 Use the body paragraphs

9 Discuss counter-arguments for your thesis

10 Conclude the essay

11 A bibliography

About the Author

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