Resilience In Unbroken

The novel, Unbroken is about overcoming struggles and doing the seemingly impossible throughout the horrific journey of Louie Zamperini. Louie, was an Olympic runner before he started working for the military where before he would know it, his life would change. Louie and his crew member’s plane had crashed in the ocean and drifted more than 40 days in a small raft. Louie and Phil had been captured by the Japanese and were later separated and sent to different POW camps that were overly abusive and put Louie through a lot of mental and physical pain. In the novel, Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand uses Louie’s life experiences to show his two most important traits, optimism, and resilience.
During Louie’s life, he had never failed to be resilient. Through the time that he had been struggling to survive at POW camps, with everything that the
Louie had been resilient while experiencing pain and abuse, he had also been tortured in POW camps for the two and a half years that he had been there. First, in the beginning of the book, Louie as a child had been bullied and had gotten himself in a lot of trouble while stealing, drinking and getting into fights, but he stayed resilient. An example includes, “Leaping around one day, he had impaled his leg on a bedpost; on another day, a neighbor had to sew his nearly severed toe back on.” (7) This is an example of how Louie has resilience, because he wouldn’t show much pain even though he was in a lot of it. Later, Once Louie had grown up, and finally noticed that getting in trouble wasn’t the right thing to do anymore, he started to run. Louie had become one of the best runners in the nation. Louie’s resilience during his running time, includes during one of his races, “The first man swerved and stomped on his foot, impaling Louie’s toe with his spike, the second man kicked back, cutting into Louie’s shins, and the third man,