The Seventh Man

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The story “The Seventh Man,” by Haruki Murakami was about a little boy that lived with his family in a small town when a typhoon hits. After all the fury of the powerful winds had calmed, the man’s dad told him that it was ok for him to walk along the beach because they were in the eye of the storm. His dad told him that when he felt or saw the first sight of wind to go right home. The man’s best friend was named K. The two boys met on the beach together, looking at all of the remains from the storm. They were so mesmerized that they forgot about the wind, so when the big waves started to come in it was too late. The man yelled for K. and tried to get him to run, but K. was swallowed up by a wave. The man stood looking for him, and was the second wave crest rolled over, he saw K. inside of it. After this terrible event, the man still can not stop blaming himself for not being able to save him. The narrator of “The Seventh Man” should forgive his actions because some people, depending on the situation, that have gone through a bad experience like that think they could have done more, when they could not. …show more content…

When the man sees K. in the wave crest, he saw that K. ”...was looking straight at me, smiling” (Murakami 139). The seventh man said himself that “I myself have trouble accepting it even now” (Murakami 139). He felt as though it was a dream, so he could not have snapped himself out of the hallucination quick enough to save him. In the story “The Moral Logic of Survivor Guilt” by Nancy Sherman, she talked about how sometimes we feel responsibility for things that we have no control over and know we did nothing wrong (Sherman 154). This is why the man feels guilty for what happened to K. It was not his fault he could not have done anything about

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