Unbroken, Presentation PDF

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Oral presentation on the novel Unbroken...

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Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand Presentation My presentation is about Unbroken – a novel that tells the incredible story of Louis Zamperini who died recently at the age of 97. The book was released in 2010, debuted at No 2 on the New York Times best-seller list and remained on the list for nearly four years. In 2014 a movie adaptation was released based on a script by the Coen brothers and directed by Angelina Jolie. The book presents the true account of Zamperini’s journey from a trouble-making childhood, through a prominent carrier as a world-class runner, a path which took him to the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Berlin, to participating in World War II bombing missions on Japanese-held territory and becoming a prisoner of war at various Japanese camps. As many of you know, I am extremely fascinated with World War II and I take every opportunity to read a good story about the war. I’ve read numerous other novels – fiction and nonfiction – watched many documentaries focusing on different aspects of the war; yet, Unbroken remains one of my favorites! It is not only because the story itself is so extraordinary. Every detail in the book is meticulously researched and documented with plenty of photographs, war documents, articles, and interviews. The author is Laura Hillenbrand, an American author of books, essays, and magazine articles. Her writing style belongs to a new generation of writers who focus more on the story itself than a literary prose style. Here is what Will Hylton from the New York Times has to say about her writing style: Hillenbrand belongs to a generation of writers who emerged in response to the stylistic explosion of the 1960s. Pioneers of New Journalism like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer wanted to blur the line between literature and reportage by infusing true stories with verbal pyrotechnics and eccentric narrative voice. But many of the writers who began to appear in the 1990s ... approached the craft of narrative journalism in a quieter way. They still built stories around characters and scenes, with dialogue and interior perspective, but they cast aside the linguistic showmanship that drew attention to the writing itself. This is evident throughout the whole book. Hillenbrand literally wants to give us the story as it happened – without drawing attention to the involvement and the role of the author in organizing and telling the story and her writing style. Of course, Hillenbrand is first and foremost an author and not a historiographer so she cannot escape entirely from fiction. My presentation, therefore, will focus on the historical events that really happened in the life of Louis Zamperini and were thus recorded in the book and how these true events intermingle with the fictional elements that are an important part of the narrative.

A rebel who became a champion “You keep going the way you’re going, you’ll end up as a bum on the street. You train. You fight harder than those other guys and you win. If you can take it, you can make it. You can do this, Lou, you just gotta believe you can. Pop does. Ma does. I do. Louis, a moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory.” “He felt as if he would faint, but it wasn’t from the exertion. It was from the realization of what he was.” The protagonist in the story, Louis Zamperini, is the troublemaker of Torrance, California, his home town. He steals food, runs constantly from the law and his bullies, and dreams of hopping on a train and leaving town for good. His beloved older brother, Pete, manages to turn his life around. He transforms Louie's love of running from the law into a passion for track and field. Louis breaks high school records, goes to the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, and trains to beat the four-minute-mile. Eventually and without even realizing it, young Zamperini becomes world-class runner. I have selected two quotes from this part of the book that show the involvement of the author herself. The first one is a very emotional and motivational speech that Pete gives to Louis in order to persuade him to start a running carrier. Hillenbrand uses strong phrases that rely on parallel constructions in order to reinforce the key message of the speech – if you do not take your life seriously and continue just messing around and doing wrong things, you will end up as a bum on the street. Louis’ brother wants to emphasize that even though this new path may appear as a hard task at the beginning, all efforts will pay off when Louis achieves glory and success, which he eventually does. The second quote illustrates the feelings that Louis has at this particular moment. It marks the moment of epiphany that Louis experiences when he realizes that he is capable of doing whatever he sets his mind to. He has the skills and power to accomplish his dream and this makes him proud and excited. He is even on the verge to faint because of the strong emotions he feels. A champion who became a survivor “It was absolutely dark and absolutely silent, save for the chattering of Phil’s teeth. The ocean was a flat calm. A rough, rasping tremor ran through the men. The sharks were rubbing their backs along the raft bottoms.” His running career is put on hold when the Second World War breaks out. Louis enlists in the army air corps and becomes a bombardier. He and his crew, including pilot "Phil" Phillips, have a very intense air battle in their plane, the Super Man. But thanks to Phil's pilot skills and Louis’ resourcefulness they manage to land the plane, even though it's riddled with over five hundred bullet holes. Since the Super Man is in such a bad condition, the men are transferred to the Green Hornet. With the new plane they have to fly above the Pacific for a search and rescue mission of another

plane that have been reported missing a while ago. The Hornet proves to be an even less-reliable plane than the Super Man, and due to a technical failure it crashes somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. Only three men survive: Louis, Phil, and Mac. Phil wrestles with his guilt about crashing, Mac kind of goes nuts, and Louis wrestles a shark from the ocean with his bare hands and eats its liver. Unfortunately, Mac dies at sea. The two men spend 47 days in the ocean and on their 47th day something happens that would drastically change their situation. Unfortunately, it is not for the best. I believe that the quote that I have chosen for this part of the work is a perfect example of Hillenbrand’s role as an author. She describes the setting around the three men and how it affects them. This excerpt shows that the men are horrified in this dire situation with the vastness of the ocean and the sharks swimming next to them. Even though the ocean is extremely calm, the men are trembling with fear. A survivor who wouldn’t be broken “Several minutes passed. Louis stood, eyes on the Bird. The beam felt heavier and heavier, the pain more intense. The Bird watched Louis, amused by his suffering, mocking him. Wade and Tinker went on with their work, stealing anxious glances at the scene across the compound. Wade had looked at the camp clock when Louis had first lifted the beam. He became more and more conscious of how much time was passing. Five more minutes passed, then ten. Louis’ arms began to waver and go numb. His body shook. The beam tipped. The guard jabbed Louis with his gun, and Louis straightened up. Less and less blood was reaching his head, and he began to feel confused, his thoughts gauzy, the camp swimming around him. He felt his consciousness slipping, his mind losing adhesion, until all he knew was a single thought: He cannot break me. Across the compound, the Bird had stopped laughing.” Louis and Phil are captured by the Japanese and holed away in a terrible POW camp. Incarceration as a PoW, especially if taken by the Japanese, was a horrible business. Zamperini found himself beaten and humiliated with appalling regularity by one particular guard, Mitsuhiro Watanabe, nicknamed "the Bird" by the prisoners. The Bird is especially tough on Louis in part because of Louis’ status as a former Olympian and an American soldier. Occasionally he was made to run against Japanese to prove their superiority. If he won, he was bludgeoned into unconsciousness. Louis manages to escape from Watanabe's torture when two Japanese newsmen give him the opportunity to broadcast a message home saying that he is alive after they learn the US government classified him as KIA (killed in action). When he refuses to broadcast a second message with anti-American propaganda, he is sent back to camp where Watanabe has each of the other prisoners punch him to teach him respect. After two years, Watanabe gets a promotion and leaves the camp. The camp is damaged when Tokyo is bombed by American forces. Louis and the other prisoners are forced to move to another prison camp, where Louis discovers, to his horror that Watanabe is in charge. The prisoners are now put to work loading coal barges. Louis, exhausted, pauses during work, and Watanabe tells him to lift a giant piece of wood and orders a guard to shoot Louis if he drops it.

Louis successfully lifts and holds up the wood despite being thoroughly worn out, and enrages Watanabe by staring him straight in the eyes; Watanabe proceeds to beat him severely. The quote next to the picture is my personal favorite. This is the part that I noticed the presence of the author the most. We, as readers, receive the inner perspective of the characters. Every single emotion is described – Louis’ feelings and thoughts, the Bird’s increasingly irritated state of mind, the other prisoners’ thoughts and fears. This makes the narration more intimate and heart-warming. It demands from the readers some kind of emotion/response. This cannot be found in any war documents with their strict and professional recordings of happenings. A war hero who is directionless “The Bird had taken his dignity and left him feeling humiliated, ashamed, and powerless, and Louie believed that only the Bird could restore him, by suffering and dying in the grip of his hands. A once singularly hopeful man now believed that his only hope lay in murder. The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer. In seeking the Bird’s death to free himself, Louie had chained himself, once again, to his tyrant. During the war, the Bird had been unwilling to let go of Louie; after the war, Louie was unable to let go of the Bird.” After the war is over, Louis reunites with his family and marries his love-at-first-sight: Cynthia. Louis develops a heavy drinking problem because he is haunted by the horrors of war and turns to alcohol to forget. He is directionless, unable to run or find a new career; he even dreams of going to Japan and killing the Bird. Cynthia manages to convince Louis to attend one of the preaching sessions of a famous preacher. Louis remembers a bargain he made with God while on the raft, and the relative peace he felt that day at sea. Finding faith enables him to quit drinking and become a motivational speaker. Years later, Louis forgives all the men who wronged him during the war. When it turns out that the Bird is still alive, Louis hopes to meet the man and forgive him in person—the Bird refuses, but Louis sends him a letter. In 1998, Louis carries the Olympic torch past Naoetsu, where he was once imprisoned, and he puts his dark past behind him. The last quote that I have chosen illustrates the idea that the author wants to express in the last part of her work – the difficult life that war veterans have after the end of the war and their feelings towards their oppressors during the war. It is the story that few PoW books have bothered to tell: of a man struggling to escape an inescapable past. There are no tunnels, no mass breakouts, no climbing the wire. This is an altogether more secure prison and the chief torturer is his own mind. Louis feels humiliated and ashamed because he cannot fight those strong emotions. Hillenbrand makes a subjective personal comment on his situation - In seeking the Bird’s death to free himself, Louie had chained himself, once again, to his tyrant. During the war, the Bird had been unwilling to let go of Louie; after the war, Louie was unable to let go of the Bird....