Alive Literary Elements

Fiction

The action takes place in the Andes mountains over a period of time spanning 6 months.

The action is told from the perspective of a third-person objective point of view.

The tone and mood in the book is a depressing and shocking one.

The protagonists are the surviving passengers while the antagonists are represented by the hardships they have to endure.

The major conflict is an internal one and is between desperation and hope.

The book reaches its climax when the survivors are found and are able to return to their families.

No foreshadowing elements can be found here.

In the few weeks after the crash, the survivors kept claiming that they will never resort to cannibalism, even if it means losing their own lives. This statement is soon proven to be an understatement as the survivors do resort to cannibalism in the end.

The main allusion we find here is the idea that everything is acceptable as long as the final goal is survival.

One of the most shocking images is presented at the beginning of the story when the narrator describes the dead bodies scattered all around the plane crash site. The description of those bodies is often mentioned by the characters and those images are used as a constant reminder of the dire situation in which the survivors found themselves in.

One of the biggest paradoxes in the book is the idea that even though the authorities were extremely close on numerous occasions to the crash site the survivors were never found.

A parallel is drawn between the survivors and the people looking for them. This parallel is used here to highlight just how important it is to never lose faith.

The plane crash becomes used here as a general term to make reference to the idea of human resilience.

We have a personification in the sentence "the trees watched over them all night".