Theme of Guilt in The Seventh Man (Essay Example)

Envision blaming oneself for the death of a close friend; the guilt one will have weighing down on their shoulders. Although everyone else knows it's not their fault, they cannot shake the sensation that they could have possibly done something to avert the situation. The disbelief one has at the concept that they survived, yet their close friend failed to, tears them apart. This is often referred to as “survivors' guilt.” Within the story “The Seventh Man,” the narrator experiences survivors' guilt when he was unable to save his friend, K., from a large wave that sweeps him into the ocean. While he had no way of saving him, he still had to bear the guilt and carry it throughout his lifetime. The narrator of “The Seventh Man” should forgive himself and not have survivor’s guilt for not having the ability to keep K. from dying.

The first reason he should not have survivor's guilt is that if he were to attempt to save him any more than he did, he might have died along with K.. It would be even worse if both of them died. Then not only one, but two families would have had to grieve with the loss of a child. “In Japan, Aldrich found that firetrucks and ambulances didn't save the most lives after earthquakes. Neighbors did.” (Shankar Vedantam The Japan example) He tried his hardest to not only save himself, but to save K., but his efforts were not enough. When an individual sees the events from a third person perspective, they can see that it was not his fault. Although one can see that, the narrator still deals with the guilt. It begins to affect his life for something he could not have prevented; he could have ended up dying with him. The seventh man starts having nightmares and can’t stand to see the vision of his friend dying. Within the Seventh Man, it states, “I stayed faraway from my hometown for forty years. I never visited that seashore--or the other.”(Haruki Murakami 141)  Although there would be no logical reason to feel guilty about it, he feels that he should be. He did all he could, but at some point you have to save yourself instead of the other person.

Another reason as to why the seventh man shouldn’t blame himself is that it was not his fault that K. was unable to hear him when he shouted. “I was sure I had yelled loud enough, but my voice did not seem to have reached him.” (Haruki Murakami 137) The narrator clearly tried as hard as he could, but K. was too immersed in what he was looking at down by the shore. By the second time he shouted it was too late, and he had to leave K. behind to guarantee he survived. He reacted the same way almost any ten year old would, he ran away from the wave. K. Being preoccupied while the wave crashed was not something that he could have prevented.

The final reason is that he cannot stop thinking about K.’s death. If he did not care, he would not deal with survivors' guilt. He sees K. looking back at him along with a menacing look on his face, which immediately wakes him up sweaty in the night. He is bothered by what he feels he could have done; he saved himself, but left K to die. At this point, K is dead, but the guilt continues traumatizing him, and the dreams only get more and more vivid. Reliving such a heartbreaking event like that every night in his dreams, seeing his best friend die in front of him every night, it all begins with the guilt he has. By him showing how much he misses and loves K. It shows that he would never mean to hurt him. In the story, “The Moral Logic of Survivor Guilt,” the author, Nancy Sherman, talks about what survivor guilt is. “The guilt begins an endless loop of counterfactuals- thoughts that you could have or should have done otherwise, though in fact, you did nothing wrong.” (Nancy Sherman 153) On the other hand, some might say that he just left K. to die, but he had to run to save his own life. He tried to get K. to pay attention to him, but all his efforts were not enough.

Ultimately, when one considers how bad the seventh man felt about the situation happening in the first place, K., not listening to his cry’s for him to get away from the shore, and also the seventh man not knowing the wave was going to be coming, it concludes that the seventh man should not have survivor's guilt. He only has reasons made up by himself to blame himself. As Stephen Hawking put it best: “The human capacity for guilt is such that people can always find ways to blame themselves.