Unbroken Essay

Unbroken, is the biography of Louis Zamperini, an American soldier and Olympic medal winning distance runner during World War II. During his time as a soldier he and his team crashed on a plane and he and three men set the record for the amount of time surviving in a floatation device. He survived the crash with his two crewmates Phil and Mac, sadly Mac passed away when stranded on the raft. When his small inflatable raft finally found ground, the passengers were swept up by Japanese forces, putting them in torture camps. While at these camps Louie meets the Bird, a ruthless guard who will haunt his dreams for the rest of his life. Throughout the novel the reader realizes that reality is stranger than fiction because of the depletion of their

food, the torturous ways of the Bird, and the events that happened after Louie returned from being held against his own will.
During the crew’s first day on the life raft, Louie instructs everyone to eat one block of chocolate per day, but instead Mac eats all of the chocolate while the Louie and Phil are sleeping.

This is stranger than fiction because Louie and Phil could not of imagined that Mac would put all of their lives at risk so he could be satisfied for a few hours. Phil and Louie were very mad at Mac, and they honestly thought he would never fix this. However he was able to redeem his actions, “...in the last days of his life, in the struggle against the deflating raft and the jumping sharks, he had given all he had left. It wasn’t enough to save him—it had probably hastened his death—but it may have made the difference between life and death for Phil and Louie. Had Mac not survived the crash, Louie and Phil might well have been dead by that thirty-third day. In his dying days, Mac had redeemed himself.” (165). In his last few days he fixed his despise by fighting away sharks when he barely had enough energy to stand. In his last days, Mac was redeemed of his stealing and Mac and Phil began to respect him again. When Mac died of starvation he had the full respect of his two crewmates, and they were sad when they said goodbye to him for the last time. The cruelty that Mac inflicted on the group was no match to the POW camp they would be held in

later.
The conditions in which Phil and Louie were held in were in all of the prison camps we harder to believe than fiction. This is stranger than fiction because it is hard to believe that the guards would treat people like that. There is one guard that is not like this, his name was Kawamura, he was a christian and would talk to Louie and Phil like they were people and not prisoners. He sometimes gave them food, and would speak to them in very basic English. “The prisoners understood almost nothing of what Kawamura said, but his goodwill needed no translation.” (185). When Louie was moved to a different prison camp, he reunited with Kawamura and the guard was as pleasant as ever. One day a prisoner yelled at Kawamura, and he snapped and started to abuse the captives he was once nice to. He did many unthinkable actions to people to beat, trick, and humiliate them. He was named one of the most brutal disciplinarians in all of the POW camps in Japan, and wanted for war crimes after the end of the war. Louie learned that he had to survive mentally, and not let his torturers own him. He learned to have hope that he would be released.
The support that Louie got from the rest of the world was astronomical.

He was featured on countless radio programs, interviews, and public speeches. He was sent thousands of letters and reached national stardom, he had a race in Madison Square Garden named after him because of his Olympic medals he won before the war. Countless other events happened, but was still terrorized by the war. In his dreams the veteran would be faced with the Bird, Kawamura, beating him, and to cope with these problems he started to drink frequently. He fell into the fate of many former soldiers and used it as a way to escape the flashbacks and terrors of the war. The strangest part was how he was able to recoup and stop his bad habits after he listened to a sermon and god talked to him. The author describes, “It was the last flashback he would ever have. Louie let go of Cynthia and turned toward Graham. He felt supremely alive.” (375). His wife Cynthia definitely liked this change, she wanted a divorce at the time and this event had changed her mind about Louie; the marriage went on. In his later life he became a camp counselor and a inspirational speaker. After the war he became an alcoholic and then became a religious speaker, he did a complete turn-around that gave everybody in his life

hope.
The horrific story of Louis Zamperini is a story of hope, throughout the novel he fights the urge to give up. The fact that this non-fiction book is stranger than fiction is somewhat ironic. The state that the prisoners of war were kept in were more odd than fiction, along with Mac eating the chocolate, and the support that Louis got from the nation after being found. When being tortured he remembered to have hope that he would be rescued, and he was. One of the themes of the novel was hope, and the universal applications for it.