The Last of Us Dramatizes the Consequences of Failing to Cope with Loss
Contempt critical acclaim for its believable characters, detractors often accuse The Last of USA of distress from a taxonomic category patch: a trope-y travelogue of divided moments that lack a bigger theme. So far, these touristed criticisms die to see how that episodic structure in reality reinforces a unified theme. Book of Joel's fear of exposure intelligibly connects the different vignettes that compose The Lastly of Us's plot. His fear of liaison is a symptom of his inability to grapple with loss, a failing that interferes with his repressed desire for a relationship worth fighting for.
A important storytelling technique the crippled deploys to illustrate Joel's internal struggle is the use of literary foils. In each apparently disconnected vignette, he meets characters who highlight, through their similar experiences, how his failure to be defenseless is a recipe for catastrophe.
In the first vignette after the prologue, Joel awakes to a knock at his threshold. He jolts from screw and holds his head in his men equally the words "20 YEARS LATER" are stratified on screen. The apposition of his last scene, cradling his dying daughter in his arms, and this one implies that psychologically, he is silent in the same emotional place we last power saw him.
Enter Tess, Joel's literal collaborator. Every bit one critic correctly observed back in 2017, Tess is the driving force posterior all of his actions in the Hub of the Universe quarantine zone and the catalyst for his relationship with Ellie. While both are As foolhardy as they are resourceful, it's clear that he takes orders from her, not the past way around. He needs her more than she needs him.
Tess constantly supplies Joel with tasks to distract him from his daughter, which allows him to continue a pattern of avoidance — until Ellie's appearance forces him to make afflictive comparisons to his daughter Sarah. From the bit atomic number 2 is tasked with escorting Ellie out of the QZ, he is reluctant to require some responsibility for her and keeps her at a distance, remarking, "You wanna know the best thing about my job? I get into't gotta know why. To be trusty with you, I could generate two shits virtually what you'ray up to." And until no, on the journey out of the city, he looks at his watch whenever Ellie reminds him of what he's lost.
Scorn Joel's desire to ditch Ellie, Tess convinces him to eventually stop running away from his problems and take Ellie directly to the Fireflies' lab to synthesise a curative. Dying from transmission, she uses her relationship with him to motivate him to care, even a little, about what Ellie's immunity represents.
Tess' biggest difference from Joel is that when the chips are belt down, she is driven to do good. He isn't. Tragically, when he rebuffs Ellie for trying to offer her condolences, he emphasizes, "You don't bring up Tess — ever." He stool't process grief — only push away people who force him to confront it. The next section of the game, where Joel and Ellie travel to feller smuggler Charge's town to ask for a car, serves to dramatize the consequences of Joel's misguided behavior.
Ellie finds the overly paranoid Bill disconnected-putt, asking Joel what his deal is. Joel explains how to behave around him, fifty-fifty offer a defense: "Bill own't exactly the most stable of individuals… He don't take too kindly to strangers. Bill's a good guy; he just definitely needs some time warm up to you, that's totally."
It's no coincidence that Joel can empathize with Bill so well. He doesn't chew Bill unstylish when a hook trap nearly kills him and Ellie, forgives Banknote when he holds the twin at gunpoint to check them for bites, and stops Ellie from break his shooting arm. The normally volatile Book of Joel is at his most patient when deactivation Bill's fear and distrust.
It's clear Bill hasn't been around masses for a precise years. Helium volunteers to Book of Joel that helium prefers the infected to the living, saying, "As bad as those things are, at least they're predictable. It's the normal people that pall me. You of all people should understand that." In that way, Bill implies that the two smugglers are more alike than Joel would attention to take on. Bill is bu a expression into Joel's potential future, a man too far gone to appreciate the evaluate of multitude.
In his way, Note tries to offer Joel what he thinks is good advice. He tells Joel to swing Ellie loose, sensing that Joel's growing empathy for her is dangerous. Bill claims to have done just that with Frank, a trusted mate He had in the past. In actuality, Outspoken abandoned Bill because he hated Measure for wanting to stay in the Lapp "shitty township" forever.
Bill represents the destruction result of Joel's lifestyle if He doesn't pioneer to Ellie: an unstable and paranoid man thus ruled away fear and distrust that he pushes away those closest to him. He's a cautionary story.
Joel rejects Bill's advice. He sees Ellie as much a liability. As the bond between the pair grows, helium is challenged to confidence others. Fifty-fifty though the pain in the neck they bring him seems inevitable, being alone is worse.
In Pittsburgh, our duo meets cardinal different survivors, Joseph Henry and Sam. Henry is our window into WHO Joel could've been. They're some from quarantine zones, traveling unfashionable west to bump the Fireflies. They both have kids in their care and strict rules that they enforce. Some are consenting to kill to protect their kids.
This commonality invites Book of Joel to expand his circle of corporate trust. When the four tourists team to escape the metropolis, Henry leaves Joel and Ellie behind when they stern't keep upfield. Later, when Joel and Ellie almost drown, Henry goes back to rescue them with Sam now safe ashore.
Joel is initially maddened, accusing Henry of leaving them to die. But Henry counters: "No, you had a good chance of qualification IT, and you did. But coming back for you meant putt him at risk. If it was the early way around, would you have come back for us?" Joel relents, fit to see things from his linear perspective.
The easy inherited intimacy of Patrick Henry and Surface-to-air missile typify a relationship ideal for Joel and Ellie. Ellie mentions IT power be good to have the pair around, and the normally misogynic Joel agrees. He lets Henry in on the plan to get his brother Tommy's help to find the Fireflies. We meet him get to pioneer. Just an encounter with a moon-curser leaves Sam putrefactive.
William Henry is reluctant to kill his brother, but eventually he shoots Sam. Get over with guiltiness and grief, Henry commits suicide. Henry's felo-de-se highlights why Joel feels the need to employ in his cruel arrangement of pain avoidance. Reverence of losing Ellie is the biggest barrier to Joel letting her into his heart, as the guilt may prove too much.
The final vignettes military force Joel to confront his pain from every angle. When Ellie asks him how He feels all but seeing his buddy again after their rift apart several years ago, he admits he doesn't make out. He doesn't want to reopen grey-haired wounds — Sarah's death, the person he became when his world was torn apart, and the incompatible worldviews that destroyed his relationship with Tommy.
By contrast, Tommy is able to invest his past behind him in a way that Joel clearly resents. Joel sees his ability to grow and change his values every bit a lack of conviction, but when we run into Tommy, Book of Joel's self-deception becomes obvious.
Tommy is surprised but well-chosen to see Joel. He's married to the drawing card of a thriving, self-sustaining community. Their settlement in Stonewall Jackson County has electricity, crops, livestock, horses, and around 20 families. His world was destroyed just like Joel's, but he found a way to help rebuild it.
Joel tries to pawn off Ellie by appealing to Tommy's idealism for the future. Tommy refuses — he International Relations and Security Network't self-serving like Joel and doesn't want to abandon his family in Jackson. Later on bribing, preaching at, and outright threatening Tommy, Joel is able to convince him, only because Tommy recognizes Joel cares for Ellie ilk he cared for Sarah.
Ellie is repulsed by Joel's decision to give her away. And World Health Organization could rap her? Atomic number 2's making decisions about her spirit without the decency to consider her feelings or represent honest near his. He tries to draw up his abandonment attempt equally pragmatic, just Ellie says what we're every last thinking and makes him face up his fears: "I'm sorry about your daughter Joel, simply I have lost people too. (…) Everyone I have cared for has either died or left Maine. Everyone – fucking except for you. So don't narrate ME I would be safer with someone else – because the truth is I would just be more scared."
Ellie explicitly reveals to Joel that his header mechanisms wear't work. By flying inaccurate to protect himself from losing his loved ones, he's really just abandoning people that need his helper dealing with their possess loss. Helium's pain people that are just like him.
Though Joel denies Ellie is his girl, both she and Tommy understand he trusts her like he did Sarah when he agrees to continue his journey with her. He on the face of it makes his peace with letting her in and puts his life in her manpower. But the close reveals that though Joel has knowledgeable to comprise vulnerable again, he will inevitably damn the humanity to avoid loss.
The Survive of U.S.'s plot is only in the Robert William Service of its character work. The vignettes show off us that Joel is perplexed between a rock and a troublesome place. To pull round, He's compelled to cast out relationships with others and the vulnerability that entails. Merely survival isn't worth it if you feature nothing and no one to live for. Straight the human activity of saving all of humanity amounts to nothing if you'Ra alone. All of life is danger, only it's a false dichotomy to think you must choose between selection and love.
The Fireflies tell Joel that the fate of humanness hangs in the balance. But the story tells us that information technology's Joel's humanity that hangs in the balance. To him, Ellie means everything. He won't forfeit her for "the greater good." Helium already destroyed the one matter in the world that mattered to him; the greater good can go fuck itself. Joel's human relationship with Ellie allows him to rediscover his humanity, simply his inability to have Ellie's expiry dooms humanity.
Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/the-last-of-us-dramatizes-the-consequences-of-failing-to-cope-with-loss/