Examples of Characters Trapped By Their Surroundings

Do you mean trapped by accident, like taken hostage or something went wrong? or trapped on purpose, like every story that takes place in outer space?

Obvious answer? The Martian, by Andy Weir. Astronaut left behind on Mars.

Also Hatchet and Brian's Winter, by Gary Paulsen. Boy stranded in Candian wilderness.

And Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Children shipwrecked on island revert to savagery.

It might help to know just what you're looking for, and why. Lots of characters get trapped for a time, in innumerable contexts. Going through all of them would take forever.

Several classic short stories come immediately to mind:

"To Build a Fire", Jack London
"The Interlopers", Saki
"The Willows". Algernon Blackwood
"The Open Boat", Stephen Crane

caw

Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
The movie The Exterminating Angel

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

robinson crusoe, swiss family robinson, life of pi
or differently mindswap ( rsheckley)

The Wizard of Oz.
Alice in Wonderland.

And for that matter, any time travel story where the character or characters get stuck in a certain time. Some of the novels of Connie Willis come to mind: Doomsday Book, and her duology Blackout and All Clear. Also Outlander by Diana Gabaldon.

This is extremely common in storytelling. The writer creates a crucible from which the characters can't simply walk away. Because if the folks in Jurassic Park could simply get to their cars and drive home, there'd be no story.

A more subtle form of crucible can be found in less action-oriented drama. The characters don't simply walk away from their difficult circumstances because they are tied to them by blood, love, money, strong desires, and so on. In this sense, it could be argued that nearly every story takes place in a crucible of some kind.

The harder thing to do is identify a story with no crucible.

Characters trapped in a harsh environment because of economics, caste, social class, have always fascinated me. Jude the Obscure is an example. Being a stonemason who wants to be a classical scholar isn't quite like being trapped on a bloodthirsty desert island, or at least it doesn't seem like it should be the same, but it turns out that in Victorian England poor Jude is as trapped by his environment as Piggy or Ralph, by theirs.. As dangerously trapped, I should add, and just as heartbreakingly doomed.

As a kid I would lose sleep thinking of ways Tony and Maria could escape their fate in West Side Story. I remember sitting in the Golden Belt Cinema screaming, mentally, "Get a bus, Tony! Buy two bus tickets to Great Bend, Kansas! You have the cash! Get out of that place and don't say goodbye to Riff! He doesn't have your best interests at heart. My Dad will hire you to work on the oil field!" Of course I was only ten at the time, and it took many years for me to realize that a bus ticket out of a place is only the first step--there are also traps in the form of family, education, culture.

Over the years I have become a fan of "stuck" novels-- characters who find themselves mired in an unbearable environment but somehow manage to persevere. Driving away from Perfection and heading to Bixby, would not have made life any easier for Val & Earl, Burt, Heather, Nestor or Walter. Battling the Graboids was their fate. They needed those Graboids! George Bailey came to see that his life in Bedford Falls was, if not wonderful, at least more than bearable.

Sometimes the characters do manage to unstick themselves and move on to another place where they (hopefully) prosper. A Home of Our Own, Tin Ticket, --both of these books are non-fiction-- The Haunting of Hill House, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Color Purple, The House on the Strand are some of my favorite "stuck" novels. --s6

Returning to add that, if you're willing to include true life accounts, there's no shortage of books about people who have been trapped by their surroundings.

First one that springs to mind is Alive, by Piers Paul Read, the story of the rugby team whose plane crashed in the high Andes in the 1970's; they famously resorted to cannibalizing their dead. Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex by Chase Owen (basis of the movie The Heart of the Sea) is the true-life account of the attack that reportedly inspired Moby Dick: an enraged whale smashed the ship, leaving the survivors adrift in leaky boats.

Again, can you clarify just what you're looking for, here? Is this for research, or an assignment, or what? As others have mentioned, there are many ways a character can be trapped by surroundings. In Gordon R. Dickson's The Dragon and the George, a modern man becomes trapped in a dragon's body in a magical variant of medieval Europe, and must complete a quest before being able to return home. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest might qualify, too.

I'm always up for a lit discussion. Like I have said, the escape or endure theme is my favorite, so I enjoy hearing about other reader's thoughts.

As far as I can remember, a book called The Boys Who Vanished, checked out of the Great Bend Public Library sometime in the early sixties, is the one that hooked me. Actually it was the cover--two boys dressed in leaf tunics, battling an ant! What kid could resist that?

Oddly, I hated the official harsh environment book of my day--Robinson Crusoe. It was too preachy to hold my interest. Now, I can see that Tom Sawyer was constantly trying to escape his environment because it was ruled by humorless authoritarian hypocrites (adults), but as a kid, that insight escaped me. Still, I loved the book despite the struggle with archaic vocab words. I didn't read it as a school assignment but because I found it in my uncle's book shelf one boring summer day. I did way more dictionary work with that book than I ever would have done if the book had been a school assignment. And then I found Andre Norton! --s6

The Hunger Games (trapped in the arena)
The Black Stallion (shipwrecked on island)
The Maze Runner (stuck in maze)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (trapped by the curse of the albatross)

Room, Emma Donoghue