Striving for Survival: Thematic Study of Patricia McCormick's Never Fall Down

In contrast to prevailing trauma narratives that reduce adolescent war survivors to symbols of victimhood, psychic collapse, or moralized endurance, Patricia McCormick’s Never Fall Down articulates survival through a less valorized, yet psychologically intricate, instinctual paradigm. In this work, the survival practices of Arn Chorn-Pond are not questioned as the remnants of a heroism or ideology that was independent of genocide; instead, they are interpreted as deeply seated manifestations of what Freud termed the life-instinct, or Eros, fellow feeling, and permanence that motivate the psychic organization set in opposition to death or decomposition that is to say, one that cannot be explained in terms of programmed responses to a least-resistance-seeking genocide. The moral disengagement (a cognitive precondition that warrants individuals to relinquish moral standards to save themselves in extreme circumstances) and the strategic production of emotional, desensitisation and abdication of language can be placed at the forefront in understanding these forces as structurally called upon, rather than ethically deviant reactions, about the behaviours portrayed by Arn. The questions addressed are deepened by a tissue-like approach to the text combined with the trauma theory as well as Freudian drive theory, making it a fresh intervention to replace the prevailing patterns of martyrdom in the analysis of young adult literature. Never Fall does not portray survival as a triumph of ethics because the accounts that follow are not a story of survival and triumph but rather a precarious balancing of the soul, one that survives amidst moral turmoil. Such a reframing advances a novel critical discourse that redefines survival not as resistance, but as a conflicted, instinct-driven imperative shaped by unbearable historical conditions. The paper thus contributes a theoretically rigorous, ethically ambivalent, and narratologically specific reading of survival in post-genocidal adolescence.