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The Seventh Man Theme

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. In reality, accidents will happen. Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do to prevent these accidents, they are unavoidable in the moment. If you are involved in an accident, a loved one may feel guilty even if they had nothing to do with what happened. These loved ones may feel irrational guilt for something they didn’t do. But that’s the point. They feel guilty for something they didn’t do, this feeling is similar to the narrator in “The Seventh Man”.
The story “The Seventh Man” is about the bond between two best friends during a natural disaster, the two boys go down to the beach and K. (one of the boys) gets taken away by one of the tsunamis waves. The rest of the story is how the narrator deals with K.’s death. The hard thing to understand is, why does the narrator feel guilty for something that he didn’t do? “The guilt begins an endless loop of counterfactuals- thoughts or should have done otherwise, though in fact you did nothing wrong.” (Sherman pg.153) This is an example of how the narrator is feeling after losing K. …show more content…

For instance, you make someone feel bad about themselves by calling them mean names or doing something rude, then later on you feel bad about it but you can’t forgive yourself? This is the same thing the narrator is feeling, but he can’t forgive himself about something he couldn’t control. "You're happy that you're alive, but then again, you're sad because you know certain people died, you know children died. You wish, you know, why not me instead of them? You just feel bad." (Eric Hunter, CNN) This is an example of real-life survivors guilt, Eric is feeling the same way the narrator does in “The Seventh

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