Unbroken Laura Hillenbrand

During the seminar, someone asked: “Was Louie truly unbroken throughout the book?” Although this book was titled Unbroken, I believe the protagonist Louie had the spirit of being unbroken but didn’t stay unbroken throughout the book. First of all, one example of Louie having the unbroken spirit was when he was told to hold the six foot beam by the Bird. When Louie was slowly sliding into unconsciousness holding the beam, he thought: “He cannot break me” (302). Malnutrition, sickness, and other physical conditions were possessed by Louie that day, but he somehow managed to hold the beam for 37 minutes. However, Louie did not stay unbroken throughout the novel. Furthermore, the author lets us see the ‘broken Louie’ in Part V. In the beginning

Louie Zamperini floated on the ocean for 47 days, and was held prisoner in Japanese POW camps for 2 years. When Louie was a child he was very rebellious. The more Louie grew the more trouble he got in. One day when Louie was running from a teacher his brother, Pete, noticed how fast Louie was. Pete helped Louie become a runner, where Louie would go to the Olympics. Louie could run 2 miles in just over 4 minutes but one day Louie was drafted and had to go to Hawaii where Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, starting WWII. On a fateful day, Louie’s plane crashed leaving him stranded in the ocean with two other men, Mac and Phil, but sadly, one had died, Mac. Louie and Phil were rescued 47 days later, but by the wrong country. Japan took them

Louie is an Olympic runner who was brought into war, and was never the same. Louie was a drunk and a criminal when he was 6. Eventually, he decided to change and became a track runner. After he was in the olympics, he went to war. In the novel, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, Louie is Resourceful and rebellious.

One way that Louie is courageous is when Phil, Mac, and him were on the raft. They were stuck in the ocean and they thought the American was coming to save them, but it was wasn’t the Americans, in the book it states, “All three men saw it at once. Behind the plane’s wing, painted on the fuselage, was a red circle. The bomber was Japanese. As Louie turned to dive in the water, Phil and Mac didn’t move.”

Louis trained day in day out for this event. He trained harder than he had ever trained in his life. He was determined to win gold. Hillenbrand describes his training. She says, “He trained so hard that he rubbed the skin right off one of his toes, leaving his sock bloody.” The moment he has been waiting for has finally arrived. Louis Zamperini is about to compete at the 1936 Olympics. He is getting himself situated at the start line, the gun goes off, and he’s off. In the middle of the race, Louis is about to take the lead when many other runners box him in with their shoulders so he can’t gain a position. A man stomps on his foot, making the spike of a shoe stick into his toe. A little later, a runner in front of his begins throwing his legs back, hitting Louis in the shines with his metal spikes. Finally, another runner elbows Louis’ ribs so hard he could feel one crack. With bruised toes, bruised shins, and a cracked rib there is no way he can finish in the top 3. Louis is on his final lap and even out of breath, he is determined to finish this race that he trained so hard for. He steps over the finish line, recording the fasted final lap ever. He didn’t finish where he would’ve liked, but he finished 7th and eventually receives a congratulations

Louis Zamperini’s life, he had some difficulties, and may be different from others, but he still had made through all of the difficulties he’ve been through. For him he made it through with a blink of an eye, well at least that’s how it showed the readers. Louie was different from other kids. He would drink beer and smoke at a young age. He then grew little by little becoming a runner. He was the best runner people have ever seen in forever. He was best known for that, he went to the Olympics, but it got canceled because of war, their war against Japan. His two character traits that stood out the most was being strong and fearless. This story is based on real life, and on a book called Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand.

In Unbroken, “Louie idolized Pete who watched over him and their younger sisters, Sylvia and Virginia, with paternal protectiveness” (Hillenbrand 8). As a child Louie was very troublesome. At the age of five he began to smoke and pick up cigarette butts while walking to kindergarten. At the age of eight, he began drinking. Later on in his life, Louie began to admire his brother Pete. Toward the beginning of the movie, Louie is seen skipping his church service and sitting on a bench drinking (Jolie). With the admiration that Louie gave his brother, Pete was able to use that in order to help Louie change and influence him to join the track team and put his skills to good use. The movie shows Pete trying to train Louie at track in order for him to become better and join the track team (Jolie). The more practice they did, the faster Louie became. He greatly admired his brother for pushing him as hard as he did so that he could be successful. Later on in the novel, Fred Garrett, a B-24 pilot admires Louie. “Garret had spent much of his time mulling over that last name on the wall, perhaps thinking that if this man survived, so might he” (Hillenbrand 215). This kind of admiration gave Garret hope. He is kept in a cell that Louie was once in when he was captured. Louie’s survival story gave Garrett the hope that he needed to make it through. Louie’s admiration increased because, “Over the years, he received an absurd number of

Louie Zamperini, some of you may know the legend filled name, but some others don’t. Who is this man? Well, he’s a man who fought in World War II, a man who, at the age of nineteen, was invited to compete in the Olympics, but what he’s most known for, is his journey of being a captive and his ‘unbroken’ spirit. Louie as a young boy, was a renowned troublemaker in his hometown, however with the encouragement from his brother, he trained his hardest to become a competitive runner. His work paid off, after a race in Berlin against Lash, he was invited to compete in the Olympics as the youngest runner to make the team. However, just as he was training to make the next Olympics, all was lost as America was at war, and he joined the Army Air Corps. His amazing journey was put together by Laura Hillenbrand, in the book Unbroken. A book that shows us the strong and defiant

Louie grew up in a small town, he was a rebel child who stole things and started fights. All he wanted to do was run away because he always had his parents or his brother lecturing and yelling at him. However, Louie had a very special gift in which he never put to work. Thankfully for his brother, he got him back on track. Louie’s gift was running, he was so fast and could never stop. Louie continues to compete and break world records soon leading him to go to the olympics and he tries to break the world record of the timed mile. His career was stopped and taken over when the second world war two broke out, and he enters the army. He becomes a bombardier. On his first mission, a battle occurs between him and his captain, however they managed to land the plane safely. Then they are placed onto a new plane that eventually gets shot down, Louie was one out of three who survived. These three men had to figure out how to survive even though they were flustered about the whole situation. One ended up dying but Louie stayed strong and was fighting for his own food to survive. Everything was going smoothly, they were surviving for a pretty long time but it quickly shifted when the japanese find them. The Japanese shuttle Louie and his

Consequently, Louie looked up to his brother Pete, who almost never got in trouble: ‘’Pete never got caught’’ (8). Pete had been in athletics, and wanted Louie to join also; in an incident involving Louie letting people into a basketball game for free, the principal banned Louie from athletics for a time: ‘’When basketball season began, there was an inexplicable discrepancy between the number of ten-cent tickets sold and the considerably larger number of kids in the bleachers’’ (13). When Pete talked to the coach, he convinced the principal to give Louie another chance. This event had an enormous impact on Louie’s life. Once joining track, he used his determination to do good in school so that he could participate in the sport. Determination in his sports life led Louie to evolve as a man, and make him a genuinely hard worker. This hard work and determination would later lead him to the Olympics in Germany, working hard like a man getting revenge and using all his tools to get to his goal. This occurred before World War 2, so the conflict would not begin until later on. This moment could be considered another crucial part in Louie’s life, as the event foreshadows the war that would lead Louie to become stranded in the Pacific Ocean and later tortured as a

Before he was a POW, he drifted 47 days across the Pacific ocean before he was a captive. The journey included sharks, bombing attacks, starvation, and trying to keep their minds sharp. In one instance, the Japanese dive bombed Louie, Phil and Mac. A difficult decision lay before Louie: either dive into the shark infested water, or be plugged up with bullet holes. Hillenbrand narrated this by saying: “Louie took a last glance at them, then dropped into the water and swam back under the rafts” (161). Jumping into Pacific ocean knowing sharks are swimming around is not an easy task. Louie’s eagle like bravery helped him survive multiple Japanese bomber attacks while fighting off hungry sharks. Louie and many other POW’s struggled to survive captivity. Japanese officers continuously abused them and made their lives hell. He showed extreme bravery at the POW camp, not only for himself but for other prisoners. When the prisoners were being starved more than usual, Louie stepped in. “Louie would hide half the rice, inch up to Phil on the parade ground, and slipped it into his hand” (214). Louie knew if he got caught he would have to deal with the consequences. Time and again, Louis risked his own safety to help his fellow

Bravery is being a leader and overcoming your fears despite the obstacles you encounter in your everyday life. For example, in the movie, “Ladder 49” A firefighter named Jack Morrison risked his life every day saving people in house fires and hotel fires. Even though he knew he was risking his life he still did it because he wanted to save people’s lives. Towards the end of the movie, he lost his life trying to save a young lady that was trapped in a huge hotel fire which he saved, but he lost his life after getting trapped in a room.

“The brave die never, though they sleep in dust: Their courage nerves a thousand living men (Minor J. Savage).” Bravery, is a noun. It’s a behavior that one displays through an action. Everyone has a different way of showing bravery and there are many ways of showing this kind of behavior. It’s not just want you do to show that you are brave, it’s also what you say. Tim O’Brien shows readers how his characters in stories, that he’s written based on his own experience, display different acts of bravery. Vietnam literature proves that Vietnam was bravery.

Despite their differences, Pete found the need to defend his brother as he marched into the principal’s office as he so desperately wanted to see him onto the right path and not the downward spiral he had been heading down. Pete played an intricate role in getting Louis to a better place as “he told the principal that Louie craved attention, but had never won it in the form of praise, so he sought it in the form of punishment. If Louie were recognized for doing something right, Pete argued, he’d turn his life around” (13). Growing up, no one was completely sure on whether or not Louis would amount to anything, but with the help of Pete he became one of the greatest runners in the world. Training constantly, Louis was pushed past his limits by Pete to achieve monumental heights in his running career. “Pete herded him out to train every day and rode his bicycle behind him, whacking him with a stick. Louie dragged his feet, belly-ached, and quit at the first sign of fatigue. Pete made him get up and keep going” (14). As a result, Louis began winning and became the fastest high school

I think bravery isn’t something you learn it’s something that you are given. NightJohn showed a lot of bravery coming back to the south. It took a lot of other bravery to teach slaves to read, write, or even to know the alphabet. It’s amazing how much it to take talk sometimes. To the master, of course, like it would take me a lot of bravery to talk to the master. I bet it took a lot of bravery to run. I couldn’t run because with my luck I would be caught on the first night. Well because I'm too damn fat to run half the time anyways. That my thoughts on bravery I like to think that I am a pretty brave guy.