The Conflict between Necessity and Morality

This is the narrative's central theme, playing out on several levels. First, it motivates the action, with events in the plot and the steadily increasing sense of narrative tension throughout the book all being defined by the tension between the striving to maintain a degree of human morality and the necessity to cast aside that morality in order to survive. Further to that point, the individual struggles of the characters (which here, as in all good narratives, define the movement of the plot) are themselves defined by their individualized wrestling with the question of survival vs. principles. This is true not only of what they do and how they act towards each other, but also in what they say. In other words, this particular theme is discussed, as well as played out. It could be argued that this emphasis on literal discussion of...