Character Analysis Of The Martian By Andy Weir

The Martian by Andy Weir

The book follows the stranded NASA astronaut Mark Watney on Mars, as he channels his inner Crusoe and tries to survive and get rescued. Weir uses logbook entries to convey Watney´s thoughts, which makes the book a bit more unique since the events of the book are told after they have happened. However Weir still makes sure there is enough suspense to go around for everyone.
Humor
Watney is all alone on Mars with only limited resources, no companions and no escape. To make the reader empathize with the Watney, Weir uses his excellent humor to create a hilarious and amazingly sarcastic main character that you genuinely like. Here are some examples:
Watney reflecting on what happened while creating O2 by extracting oxygen
I suppose, maybe, he actually worked at NASA…that would make a great deal of sense —— Nope, just checked on Wikipedia (which cannot lie) and he has a “background in computer science.” Awesome. I bet he wasn’t a test engineer though. The guy responsible for the safety checks and inspection of an all important NASA rocket is asked by the flight director how long he needs (they’re in a hurry to get supplies to Mark on Mars) he points out it takes 10 days. Under pressure he concedes that the inspections only find a critical fault about one in about forty launches and therefore agrees to cut them completely. Now, as someone who used to be responsible for Quality in a large software company, I can assure you that any engineer who was good enough to work for NASA would have pointed out that the rush job they were doing meant the risks were seriously amplified and would have argued for an extra ten days on top of the usual ten. But he didn’t, and you can guess that things don’t go smoothly. The guy responsible for the inspections almost killed Mark Watney. Anyway, I
The psychological ramifications of loneliness are ignored. Watney spends roughly 2 years on Mars alone with TV reruns and bad music. His only communication is text chat, and while that would go some way towards abating loneliness, it isn’t enough. People need human interaction. Even the most introverted person needs it to survive. Humans sociability is what allowed us to evolve to be what we are now. He is shown to go a bit loopy towards the end, but in all reality even the most resiliant person would eventually slip into deep depression from the lack of human contact. On top of that, loneliness has the medical ramifications of reducing the effectiveness of your immune system, causing you to feel overly or unesicarrily tired, and extreme cases of loneliness cause psychosis in the forms of auditory hallucinations. A person who is alone for to long will literally start to hear voices around them, much like someone who suffers from schizophrenia. Those are just the big ones, but for the sake of time we’ll move