Name: Lance Smar

A Picture of Elements
Title of Story: The Martian

Author: Andy Weir

Character: A person or an animal that takes part in the action of a literary work
Your Characters Name & Brief Description: The main character in The Martian is Mark
Watney. He is extremely resourceful person and has great problem solving skills. Mark
is Ares 3 botanist and engineer. For living in an environment that is constantly trying
to kill him, he is very cheerful, positive, and constantly making jokes to himself.
Conflict: A struggle between opposing forces; can be external or internal
One of the conflicts in my story is: The main conflict in this story is that the Mark is
trying to survive on Mars, a planet where nothing lives, long enough for a Nasa shuttle
to pick him up. Only problem is Nasa thinks he died in a sandstorm and he has no
communication with Nasa. So hes stranded on Mars till Nasa figures out he is alive.
Setting: The time and place of the action including details such as location, time of
year or day, weather, etc. (serves as a backdrop)
A brief description of the setting of my story is: The setting in The Martian in on Mars.
Mars is a giant desert with no water, no oxygen, and a very small atmosphere.
Theme: A central message, concern, or purpose in a literary work; usually can be
expressed as a generalization about human beings or about life (examples: survival,
hardships, family, friendship, differences, love)
A theme of my story is survival and is expressed through the following detail: The
theme of The Martian is survival because Mark is stranded on Mars with little supplies,
and must use his problem solving and engineering skills to survive. For example, in
chapter 13, when a giant tear in the hab develops. The pressurized air from the hab
rushes out flinging the airlock 40 meters away from the hab with Mark in it crushing
his faceplate. Soon Mark hears hissing in the airlock, so that means the airlock is
breached. So to find the breach he needs to make a fire to see where the smoke leaks
out in the hole in the sideways airlock. The only problem is that every material with
him is non-flammable except his very own hair. So he ends up uses his hair to start a
fire and find the leak, which he seals with good old duct tape. But the biggest problem
(for now) is that he has a giant hole in his face plate and is running out of nitrogen
very fast to make up for the air loss. So being resourceful Mark, he then cuts off the
arm of the EVA suit (not his real arm) and uses that material and the sticky resin in his
patch pack to seal the EVA suits arm and faceplate. In this series of events where
Mark seals the airlock and his suit, he shows the theme of survival by improvising with
his resources to survive the Martian environment. In this case he has to use his hair to
start a fire to find the leak in the airlock, and he has to use the arm of his suit to fix the
giant hole were his faceplate used to be.