Survivor Type

Richard Pine (formerly Pinzetti) is the protagonist and narrator of “Survival Type.” Even though his isolation and physical and mental degradation propel the story, his motivations and personality remain unchanged throughout the narrative. He is a round character, as he encompasses complex and multifaceted identities, but he reveals himself to be deeply unsympathetic and unlikable. He is more than the traditional antihero; he is the antagonist of his own narrative. He is evidently clever, talented, hard-working, eloquent, and he can be funny. However, his account reveals deliberate violence, bullying, sadism, drug dealing and smuggling, abuse of medical trust, fraud, and racism. Pine’s life is a story in ambition, self-aggrandizement, and criminality. His narrative is imbued with misanthropy: He is insulting about everyone and everything, consistently lacks empathy, and seeks to blame others for his failings.

Pine is an Italian American from New York. Although he frames his early life as one of negativity and victimhood, through another lens, it would be a success story. He becomes a star ball player and excels at school, winning a full scholarship to train in medicine, joining a fraternity at university. Despite this, he hates everybody, despises his family’s origins, is “glad” when his father dies, bullies and manipulates his way through life, and avoids “connections” with others unless they further his financial or status ambitions. He engages in criminal abuses of his position as a medical intern and resident, including “pushing” drugs, making enough money to set up on Park Avenue. After he is caught (and his associate dies by suicide), his medical license is revoked. In response, Pine moves into illegal drug smuggling, causing him to be on the sinking Callas with a large quantity of heroin. Once stranded on the island, he reveals these details of his life although not in order and viewed through a warped self-justifying perspective.

Pine is an unreliable narrator throughout, as he writes an account of his past life and his experiences on the island for his own purposes. His backstory reveals him to be dishonest and lacking in self-knowledge. This unreliability is compounded by the narrative’s gradual structural disintegration, signifying Pine’s increasingly poor physical and psychological state. Pine’s role as character-narrator is therefore inseparable from the story’s form and themes of Justification and Revelation Through Self-Narration, The Instinct to Survive, and Racism as Hatred of the Self and Others. These themes rely on Pine’s unreliability as narrator, his lack of awareness, his contempt, blame and scapegoating of others, and his deeply conflicted sense of self.

The story presents as a form of psychological and moral case study, examining Pine’s experience on the island and his past life as a whole. His character is far removed from the action hero of conventional survival stories. Part of the story’s horror and psychological darkness lies in the challenge Pine’s character presents as an object of the reader’s pity, empathy, or emotional investment. In creating a psychological study around such a flawed character, King asks the reader to consider the value of life and survival as an absolute principle. Instead of focusing on the question of whether or how Pine will survive, it focuses on whether he should. “Survival Type” pushes the limits of human compassion through its portrayal of Pine.