Ong Ren Yeu Mr. Adriel Wong ENL 101 29 March 2016 The Story Of Survival In “Unbroken” Unbroken is a story of survival of a USA Olympian during the World War II and the process of redemption from Louie the main character in the movie Unbroken. In fact, Unbroken was written by Laura Hillenbrand and has spent more than four years on the New York Times best seller list. In the movie, we see Louie survive crash landings, shark attacks, Japanese POW (prisoner of war) camps, and PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder) with a little luck and strong personal strength. In the beginning of the movie, we see that Louie experiences an aircraft crash landings in the Pacific Ocean during the war. While Louie and the crew of the plane crash: Mac and Phil survived, …show more content…
In the movie, it defined which Louie was once an immoral person in his pre-war life. As a child, Louie grows up in his neighborhood; at the time, he expressed this defiance in an inappropriate and destructive ways. He steals and snatches from the local businesses and the neighborhood. His beloved older brother, Pete, gave Louie a new challenge: running. Louie poured his determination into the training, through physical and mental resilience—eventually Louie emerging as an Olympian who competed at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In the movie, it speculates that this experience with adversity and the resilience such experiences helped to build up allowed Louie to survive the war. Getting stranded in a life-raft for forty-seven days was just another limitation or obstacle to overcome. Similarly, after being captured by the Japanese and subjected to the daily cruelties and humiliations of the Japanese labor camp, Louie never gave in to despair or hopelessness. Louie’s resilience made him able to withstand the war but, perhaps, made him less able to handle reintegration into normal civilian life after the war. Before and during the war, Louie’s resilience had always been defined by the very concrete obstacles he faced, whether that was training for the Olympics or surviving on the raft or in the Japanese camps. After the war, Louie was faced instead with the threat of his own mind: psychological wounds like night terrors and flashbacks. He fought against these obstacles much as he did against external obstacles, in this case repressing them with the use of alcohol. But that combative resilience had destructive effects in peacetime, both to himself and his family. It was only when Louie found a new kind of resilience, a belief in God founded on acceptance rather than defiance, that he could heal and remake his civilian