Survivor's Guilt : The Moral Logic Of Survivor Guilt

On paper, survivor guilt seems to be a completely irrational concept. Why should you feel guilty if someone died and you survived if you had absolutely nothing to do with that person’s death, or if you tried to save someone’s life but you physically couldn’t? Without context, it almost seems silly. However, in the real world, people will form strong emotional bonds with each other and will feel responsible for their friends and family if all goes wrong, even if you had nothing to do with what has occurred. Similarly, if someone you have strong emotional connections to dies from an incident and you do, the resulting regret, grief, and guilt is known as survivor guilt. In “The Seventh Man” by Haruki Murakami, a tsunami strikes the narrator’s hometown, during which he and his friend K., while in the tranquil eye of the storm, go to the beach they spend lots of time together to assess the damage from the first half of the storm. While there, a loud noise is heard by the narrator, and sees a gargantuan wave speeding toward the shore, and tries to pry K. out of the path of destruction, alas, he was too invested in an object upon the sand. The narrator speeds away from the wave in an attempt to save his own life, and soon sees K. inside the second wave after being swept away in the first. Throughout the rest of the narrator’s life, he deals with horrible nightmares and a guilty conscience as a consequence of his traumatic childhood event and tries to rid

Recalling painful memories makes us mentally stronger in a way. If one could go through such terrible hardships, then it would be easier to endure other obstacles. Take Elie Wiesel for example, a survivor of one of the most devastating period of history, the Holocaust. During the World War ll, the Jewish population were prosecuted by the Nazis because of their beliefs.

Fatal disasters are terrible by nature, and although the physical aftershocks are dreadful the emotional ones can be as well. The feeling of guilt that come to the survivors afterwards is known as survivor’s guilt, and it is a very painstaking mental process. Survivor's guilt is something largely disputed due to it's personal and terrible nature. Although it may seem like a horrendous thing for a person to endure it may be necessary for a person to heal and come terms with the tragedy they were involved in. Without guilt people involved in fatal tragedies would be less human, because it is human nature to go through grievances after tragedies even if they were not directly involved. Survivor’s guilt is the natural way of dealing with grief and the feeling of not having done enough to have prevented more loss or any at all. Some believe it is to cruel of a way to heal after all the person had been through, but they do not realize the development emotionally that occurs while haunted by the guilt. Survivor’s guilt was created by human nature to heal emotionally even after the physical event has occurred.

It’s easier to turn a blind eye to other people's problems instead of getting involved from fear of causing pain to ourselves. “My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent” (39). Sometimes there’s a risk of us getting hurt, so we just pretend something didn't happen. I think it’s easier that way. It’s easier to just look away and not get our heart involved rather than risk being hurt ourselves, like when someone we didn’t know, or who wasn’t close to us dies, it doesn't bother us a lot. Their death doesn’t directly affect us or our daily lives. In fact, we try not to think about it because it would put a burden on us. The Jews couldn't think of every single person who died, otherwise they wouldn't be able to function normally. The grief would wash over them like an unbearable wave. “The dead remained in the yard, under the snow without even a marker, like fallen guards. No one recited Kaddish over them. Sons abandoned the remains of their fathers without a tear” (92). The sons couldn't care about their fathers deaths. They had to move on in order to survive. The Jewish prisoners saw so much death that eventually it didn't seem to bother them. It didn’t matter who died, because they couldn’t care. All they could care about was survival. All of these deaths that they saw everyday were only a part of the traumatic event they went

survive. People will usually not feel the effects of guilt or pain at that moment in time because it

GUILT is an emotion one gets when he/she believes or discovers that he/she did a wrong deed and valuated his/her standard social, moral or penal code ( Chaplin, 1975). The intensity of guilt varies from one person to another. When some individuals survive a horrific event, they get this overwhelming feeling of guilt and blame themselves for surviving the abominable situation that others did not survive. This state of mind is a mental condition and is sometimes termed as imagined guilt. It may be found in survivors of holocausts, natural disasters, mass murder and pandemics e.g. the 9/11 Oklahoma City bombings. While this guilt might not be experienced by everyone, it a research based

Guilt is a confusing new emotion. They may feel guilty over things that logically should not cause guilt. They may feel guilt when this initiative does not produce desired results.

Regretful, ashamed, and sorry. Feeling responsible for a specified wrongdoing. Guilt. Have you ever felt guilty? Do you ever blame yourself, or wish you could turn back time to change just the smallest of details, knowing that your life will be so much better because of it? Yes or no, or whatever your answer may be, many people, and many characters have. The Book Thief is a prime example in which many of its characters experience guilt. They blame themselves for the fact that someone died while they are still alive, yet they find many ways to deal with this guilt. Throughout The Book Thief, the author demonstrates how survivor’s guilt continues to provide motivation for the characters to alter their lives in many ways.

Guilt is the worst experience known to humans because it ties you up in knots and makes you feel unworthy and miserable. For instance, when Sal’s mother was eight months pregnant, Sal fell from the branches of a tree. She broke her leg and fell unconscious. Sal's mother found her, carried her home, and rushed her to the hospital to be fitted in a cast. At home later that night, Sal's mother went into a difficult labor. The doctor arrived too late, the umbilical cord had strangled the baby, and Sal's mother was hemorrhaging badly. The baby was born dead her father tells Sal that she shouldn’t blame herself on the baby’s death. From the book “And then I started thinking about my mother's stillborn baby and maybe if I hadn't climbed that tree and if my mother hadn't carried me, maybe the baby would have lived and my mother never would have gone away, and everything would still be as it used to be”(Creech 257) here Sal is blaming her self for her mother abandonment.

This feeling of responsibility of someone’s death is a feeling shared among many of the

Robert South once said “Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, as that does which at last eats out the very heart and substance of the metal.” As this quote describes, guilt is terrible to feel and can drive a man insane. This is shown in the Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In the story, the narrator explains how he isn’t insane and just smart. He also says that he loved the old man, but had to kill him because of his one flaw, his vulture eye. He was so confident that he ignored his conscience and killed him. He hid the body under the floorboards so the police would have no evidence when they came. The narrator had committed the perfect crime but his heart beat with guilt and drew him insane to the point where he tore up the floorboards and confessed himself. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe uses symbols such as the narrator’s heart, the old man’s eye, and the narrator’s confidence to demonstrate a man’s fight with his conscience.

v Guilt (such as feeling others should have lived and he should have died, or feeling

This also shows that his guilt is not just a little issue to him but rather guilt is suffocating him to the extent where he allows the feeling to take his life. An incident occurred where I was also led to the wrong path by guilt. In grade four, one of my friends, Waqas, started to make fun of a new girl in school who also turned out to be my neighbour, Areej. Being the foolish girl I am, I decided to join Waqas with the teasing. The childlike comments started to worsen which resulted in Areej crying.

Our experiences of suffering may also help us in our moral conduct as an experience of suffering serves to make us sympathetic to the trials of others. We learn to a) help the afflicted (through consolation and relief) and to B) not inflict harm on others, having experienced suffering ourselves. Furthermore, many spiritual seekers in the past have felt that suffering and spiritual progress are inexorably linked, pointing to St Teresa of Avila and St Francis of AssisiI as examples . I believe that if we can learn from our