Unbroken (The Young Adult Adaptation): An Olympian's Journey from Airman to Castaway to Captive

One of the central goals of the POW camps was to take the dignity and thus hope, away from the prisoners. Through emotional and physical abuse, starvation, inhumane living conditions, and more, the guards strip the former soldiers of their humanity and do their best to give them no hope of survival.

Ironically, Louie and the other men find resistance to their abuse through theft—an act typically considered immoral. Instead, it allows them to gain back power in an otherwise helpless situation. Hillenbrand writes that the men “had to steal to survive,” but also that “in so degrading a place, stealing won back the men’s dignity” (181). The irony, that an inhumane act would bring back their humanity, conveys just how dire the situation was for the men in the prison camps. Lacking sustenance, and enduring physical and emotional abuse, the men steal to return power to themselves and to give them hope for survival.

After the war has ended, Louie and the other former prisoners battle with the lasting effects and the PTSD of what they had endured. As Hillenbrand explains:

The Pacific POWs who went home in 1945 were torn-down men. Carrying unspeakable memories of torture and humiliation, they felt deeply vulnerable. Their dignity was gone, replaced with a sense of shame and worthlessness. The central struggle of postwar life is to restore their dignity. There was no one right way to peace; every man had to find his own path (252).

For Louie, his “path” becomes his discovery of the power that faith, and through it, forgiveness, can have to restore his dignity and his humanity. After seeing Billy Graham, he dumps all of his alcohol. With his newly restored faith, he is finally able to forgive the guards for what they did to him, which allows him to no longer suffer from nightmares or flashbacks of the war. He realizes that “he was not the worthless, broken, forsaken man the Bird had tried to make of him. […] His dignity had returned” (269). Faith and his ability to forgive the men who abused him allow Louie to regain his dignity and turn his life around.

The two conflicts that Louie faces throughout the text, externally in the form of ruthless prison guards like the Bird and internally with the lasting emotional effects of the war, convey just how important one’s dignity is to survival. Treated as less than human, Louie is nearly broken by his experiences in the war and struggles to adjust to civilian life when he returns home. However, through faith, he can finally forgive what was done to him and regain his dignity and humanity.

As Louie survives each of the ordeals he faces throughout Unbroken, he discovers the power that lies in being able to forgive wrongdoings and rebuild his life for the better. At the start of the text, Louie is characterized as someone who is rebellious and out of control, stealing from the people in the town of Torrance, starting random fights with strangers, and even running away from home. He struggles with a lack of direction in his life before he discovers the power that running holds for him. As he dedicates his life to running and competing in the Olympics, he discovers that the town has forgiven him for his wrongdoings and throws its support behind Louie to help him succeed. They hold a parade for him, give him gifts as he departs for Berlin, and send him telegrams of support and congratulations. Similarly, his parents and brother, Pete, forgive him for his actions as a child and support him in his Olympic dreams. As Hillenbrand writes, “Once his hometown’s archvillain, Louie was now a superstar, and Torrance forgave him everything” (21). This forgiveness gives additional motivation and strength to succeed.

While stranded on the raft, Louie is given the chance to practice forgiveness himself. After Mac eats all of their food rations the first night and spirals into hysteria, Louie makes the decision not to reprimand him and attempts to understand what Mac is experiencing. Louie and Phil catch albatrosses and give Mac the blood to give him additional sustenance and do their best to keep him alive—forgiving him for potentially killing them. As a result, Mac twice saves Louie and Phil from certain death. First, he fights to help the men bail water and repair the boat, a task that could not have been done with only two of them (122). Then, as Louie attempts to touch the sharks in the water, he is viciously attacked and almost pulled from the raft; however, to his surprise, Mac intervenes and helps Louie fight off the sharks. These two acts of redemption are only able to occur because of the forgiveness that Louie and Phil had previously shown to Mac. Instead of allowing him to die, they support him and provide him with sustenance, allowing Mac to gain redemption—and Louie and Phil’s lives to be saved twice—due to the power of forgiveness.

Lastly, after the war has ended, Louie makes one final, powerful act of forgiveness: he forgives the guards and even the Bird for what they did to him during the war. As he visits the guards at the Sugamo Prison, he greets them warmly “hands extended, a radiant smile on his face” as he realizes that he no longer holds any hate or anger toward them (273). To his surprise, as he asks about the Bird, he realizes that he has forgiven him as well. He contemplates how the Bird was now “a lost person, a life now beyond redemption,” and Louie “felt something he’d never felt for his captor before. With a shiver of amazement, he realized it was compassion. At that moment, something shifted sweetly inside him. It was forgiveness, beautiful, effortless, and complete. For Louis Zamperini, the war was over” (273). This forgiveness, brought about by his faith formation, ends “the war” within Louie as he is finally able to move past what the Bird did to him in the war. No longer a prisoner of his past, Louie can use that forgiveness to move forward, past his PTSD, and out of his state of alcoholism.