Endurance: the Caird presses on

• Literary Term: mood- the emotional atmosphere of a work
• example: "Their helplessness was almost total, and they knew it."
• Quote: "On this score, their general feeling, at least outwardly, was confident.  But how else might they have felt?  Any other attitude would have been the equivalent of admitting that they were doomed.  No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail."
• Hope is a dangerous thing.  It can keep us holding on when we feel we're about to break.  It also has to power to destroy us even more inside when we finally realize that there really isn't any hope for our situation at all.  Throughout this section of the novel, the men were constantly fighting against hope.  Once they began to hope it was possible to be rescued, they opened themselves up to the possibility of being crushed if their plan failed.  When Shackleton left with five other men in the Caird, every man attempted to act as normally as possible.  They wanted to believe that Shackleton and his men would bring back help for the twenty-two remaining on the island.  All of the men put on strong faces in front of each other, while on the inside each was trying to ignore the gnawing possibility that no help would ever return for them.