Survivor Syndrome Short Story

We are often inclined to believe that we are self-righteous and selfless. Yet we are also quick to condemn the actions of others whilst being unaware of our own greedy nature. When we are put in situations that demand us to make a choice between helping another individual or ensuring our own survival, we are more likely to choose the thing that can benefit us the most, even if it goes against our morals and our perception of ourselves.

This conflict can be seen in Survivor Syndrome that is a short story that was written by Liz Jensen in 2011. It portrays the story of a man by the name Dmitri who is on a quest to capture a picture that embodies human tragedy. As more people in London become sick with a fatal disease, he must decide between helping a young boy and achieving his goal.

While Dmitri is determined to capture the perfect picture, it also makes him blind to the suffering of others on another hand as the following quote suggests ‘’I noticed, for example, that although I cared about people less, my aesthetic appreciation of them was becoming keener. And my head cooler. Surely this was no bad thing? As I photographed drowning vistas and bedraggled families, old Alexander’s words sank in deeper, and I began to hanker after the one image that would encapsulate the essence of the catastrophe’’(P. 243, l.37-43). The rhetorical question might indicate that Dmitri does not perceive his actions as being wrong. Instead he is focused on the task that he has been given and one