Survivor Guilt - References in Popular Culture

References in Popular Culture

The 1979 novel Sophie's Choice and the subsequent movie feature a Polish Holocaust survivor who had to choose which one of her two young children was allowed to survive.

In the 1980 film, Ordinary People, based on the novel of the same name, Conrad Jarrett is a young man who struggles with surviving a sailing accident which killed his older brother. As Jarrett realizes that he is angry at his brother's recklessness, he confronts the very cause of his problems and begins to accept his own survival had nothing to do with his brother's death.

In the video game American Mcgee's Alice, and the sequel game, Alice: Madness Returns the protagonist, Alice Liddell enters an imaginary world (Wonderland) turned malicious by her guilt of surviving the fire that killed her parents and sister.

In the Modern Warfare 3: Hardened Edition it is stated in John "Soap" Mactavish's journal that he took up smoking after feeling survivor's guilt over what happened to Gaz and Griggs.

Rise Against's album Endgame contains a song entitled "Survivor Guilt".

In Doctor Who, the Ninth Doctor spends a full season enduring survivor's guilt after the destruction of his people, the Time Lords, at the end of the Time War.

In the musical Les Misérables Marius Pontmercy sings "Empty Chairs At Empty Tables" which contains lines such as, "Oh my friends, my friends - forgive me, that I live and you are gone. There's a grief that can't be spoken. There's a pain goes on and on."

In several episodes ALF, Gordon "ALF" Shumway experiences survivor guilt since he and a few of his Melmacian friends, including his girlfriend, were the sole survivors after Melmac exploded.

Julia Hoban's book Willow explores the survivor guilt of a sixteen-year-old girl whose parents died in a car crash where she was driving. Despite the fact her parents knew she didn't have her license and the weather conditions caused the accident, she feels as if the accident was her fault and that she shouldn't have survived, resulting in her participating in self-harm.

Multiple characters in the BioWare science fiction game series Mass Effect express feelings of survivor guilt including Ashley Williams, Garrus Vakarian, and even Shepard him/herself if the Sole Survivor background is chosen at character creation.

In the Family Ties episode, "My Name is Alex", Alex Keaton sees a psychiatrist about his survivor guilt after his friend is killed in a car accident, in part because his friend was running an errand that Alex declined to help him with.

In the "Honest Hearts" downloadable content for Fallout:New Vegas, it is indicated through the journal entries of mentioned-only character named Randall Clark that he suffers from survivor's guilt after the deaths of his wife and son.

The Japanese war film Otoko-tachi no Yamato briefly touches upon survivor's guilt, when the main character Katsumi Kamio returns to Japan after the Yamato is sunk, along with nearly all of her crew of 7,000. Kamio visits the mother of one of his dead friends and shipmates to tell her about her son's death, not believing her son is dead she calls him a liar and then says "How dare you be one to survive" before walking off. The day after she finds him working in the rice field, he kneels before her and begs her forgiveness for being "the only one left". In response to this she drops to her knees and begs his forgiveness for what she said to him.

The Japanese visual novel Fate/Stay Night focuses on the protagonist, Shirou Emiya, who suffers from survivor's guilt after being saved in a catastrophic fire as a child. The story follows how this has warped his perception of morality and his single-minded pursuit of justice as a result and the consequences of leading such a life.