AOI and such

My AOI is communication and story telling as survival tools. My questions are who survives by communicating and who dies by the lack? why do those who survive do so? How is possible people are completely shut out (lisbons)? How do false stories aid or hinder survival.
This is the story of the boys telling their story. The passage on 182 that starts with "how long could we remain true to the girls?" show how the boys are reflecting in this moment and realizing the story they had been telling is wrong. They say "our talismans ceased to work" (182), showing their loss of communication with the girls whom the boys were unsure about the level of interest of the girls. It helped them function thinking the girls shared similar interests. This fallacy was beneficial to the boys during the time when they originally struggling to figure out the girls and what was going on but once they realized their thinking was skewed, the inaccuracy hurt them because they lost the confidence in their observational skills that they thought they had.