On The Beach                          

By: Nevil Shute

What contrast between certain character's human natures are most evident during this "inevitable death" situation?

    We're all dying, in Sylvia Plath's sense of the words, and we all have to find our ways to cope with this fact.  But knowing the exact day you will die and knowing that life doesn't last forever are two completely different fears the latter being alot easier to deal with.  When the word got out that everyone was going to die very soon the reader got to see many completely different personalities.  Those include ingnorance, superstition, hope, religious dependance, suicide and depression.

    Knowing you are about to die is considered to be the worst possible phrase one can hear. It will either destroy you or, for some, fill you with hope. Our mind is hotwired to hope.  It makes us human above all other things.  It's remarkable how a human being can be in the most desperate situations and still a sliver of hope until that last second.  If I was present in that situation I would have swiftly popped in the cyanide and let its effects cure me of my depression.  There were many who thought like I would have but others just decided to continue to passively allow their addiction to life to control them.  Alcoholism and drug abuse also arise in this novel as expected.  People will do just about anything to forget about death.  And why would you waste your only life thinking about it's end. 

    In the end, it didn't really matter who stuck it out the longest, or who cherished their last days the longest because, in the depressing ending to this depressing novel, every died.

    To put in my personal opinion, I have no more respect for the ones who stuck it out till the end than the ones who took the lethal pills.  And there is no way I could justify choosing which one makes a stronger person unless I was actually in that situation.