Title The Berlin Stories written by Christopher Isherwood captures both the charming and repellent life of Berlin during the 1930’s. Isherwood uses the descriptive technique of narrating the story through the focal depth of a camera. He captures fleeting and evocative images of his surrounding environment and tries to mold his brain into an internal visual recorder. Isherwood uses the camera as a metaphor to portray his neutral stance as an author and the distance he creates between self and other. Isherwood’s famous opening phrase “I am a camera” shows readers that his purpose is to keep his shutter open, and the narratives that follow are accumulated instances of observation that is made before the shutter closes. Isherwood’s use of the …show more content…
Isherwood follows the procedural dynamic of the camera by maintaining an objective approach to his surroundings and the people in them, however, toward the end of the novel; he begins to show personal emotions concerning the people he writes about. Isherwood’s objective approach in relation to his metaphor of a camera is outlined by his relationship with Sally Bowles. Sally is portrayed as a vivacious and highly immature socialite as she dreams of becoming a great actress one day. Her larger than life mannerism and dotty charm appeal to Isherwood as a subject for him to study. His camera like narration throughout the novel is enforced when he begins to describe Sally’s outer characteristics. As she begins to light a cigarette he notices her elderly …show more content…
He continues to portray himself as an eternal outsider who watches the passing parade of life. Peter and Otto’s questionable friendship lead the readers to believe that they could be involved in a homosexual relationship. Isherwood remains unbiased as he refrains from labeling and categorizing the two men. He begins by describing Otto, “at present, he makes up to me assiduously, flattering me, laughing at my jokes, never missing an opportunity of giving me a crafty, understanding wink” (283). Isherwood’s passive portrayal is reflexive of his objectivity towards the people around him. Instead of adding his own commentary, he continues the narration in a nonchalant tone. He is not moved or fazed by the actions he witnesses and alternatively adds it to the images being recorded in his brain. Isherwood’s distance that he keeps from his subjects, although necessary, isolates him and leaves him alienated from society. His journey with Peter and Otto quickly comes to a close as Peter leaves for London soon after Otto. Surprisingly, Isherwood was unusually lonely as he deeply missed the company of his companions. Due to his feeling of loneliness, he decides to travel back to Berlin. “I thought I should stay on till the end of August, and perhaps finish my novel, but suddenly, the place seems so lonely. I miss Peter and Otto, and their daily quarrels, far more
This extract emphasises the lonely, outworld feeling that would have been felt living in such settings. This puts into perspective the feeling that will be felt during the coarse of the plot development.
Elie Wiesel’s book “Night” shows the life of a father and son going through the concentration camp of World War II. Their life long journey begins from when they are taken from their home in Sighet, they experience harsh and inhuman conditions in the camps. These conditions cause Elie and his father’s relationship to change. During their time there, Elie and his father experience a reversal in roles.
In summary, all themes and settings interlink with each other to further highlight the importance and impact each has during their entirety of the novel. Many lessons are also taught through this novel, such as the importance of friendship and the proper understanding of the events going on around you and others. Overall this novel is good way to give some idea of the events which happened during the Holocaust and the Nazi Regime.
The narrator's life is filled with constant eruptions of mental traumas. The biggest psychological burden he has is his identity, or rather his misidentity. He feels "wearing on the nerves" (Ellison 3) for people to see him as what they like to believe he is and not see him as what he really is. Throughout his life, he takes on several different identities and none, he thinks, adequately represents his true self, until his final one, as an invisible man.
Night is an non fiction, dramatic book that tells the horrors of the nazi death camps all around Europe. The book is an autobiographical account of what happened, so the main character is the author. The author is Elie Wiesel who was only 14 year old when Nazi Germany came through his town of Sighet, Transylvania. This is story is set between the years of 1944 and 1945. Elie and his family of 4 are optimistic when Germany begins to take power. Germany invades Hungary, then arrives in Elie’s town. The Nazi’s begin to take over the Jews by limiting their freedom. Jews are eventually deported. The Jewish people are crowded into wagons where they are shipped to Auschwitz. He is separated from his mother and sister. Over the course of the book, Elie and his father are sent to two different concentration camps. Their final concentration camp is Buchenwald. His father ends up dieing before the allied troops liberated Budapest in 1945. Elie is left with the memories of death and violence.
World War Z, written by Max Brooks, is an apocalyptic novel that follows an interviewer on a quest to piece together the global history twelve years after the zombie apocalypse that came to be know as “The Dark Years”. This novel is said to be an “oral history” because the plot is structured around the personal experiences around the world that is documented by an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission. For the majority, oral histories are seen as beneficial because they allow for a unique perspective in historical records that readers do not usually get a sense of in a basic textbook. In order for one to understand its critical influence in this novel and its plot structure, it is important for readers to fully grasp what exactly
According to the dictionary hope is thinking and wanting something to happen or be true (“Hope”). During difficult times hope can either be everywhere or completely lost. World War Two was a time in which it was almost impossible to find hope. It seemed as if every person had given up hope for a better life and future. But one person who seemed to bring hope in a hopeless place was Raoul Wallenberg. Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat and businessman in Hungary who saved the lives of countless Jews ("Raoul Wallenberg”). World War Two was filled with despair and tragedy, however that where people like Raoul Wallenberg who brought hope to Hungarian Jews and people today.
In the beginning of the novel, Bernard is the perfect representation of what is is wrong with this society. He is the misfit, the outsider, the enigma of the dystopia. This is demonstrated adequately with his first date with Lenina. When Bernard denied the Soma, stating that he would “rather be [him] self”. This action of being oneself is the one thing that it seems that the others
Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, took the time to inform the world about his experiences as a prisoner of Auschwitz during the Holocaust in order for it to never happen again. Wiesel uses a language so unbearably painful yet so powerful to depict his on memories of the Holocaust in order to convey the horrors he managed to survive through. When the memoir begins, Elie Wiesel, a jewish teenager living in the town of Sighet, Transylvania is forced out of his home. Despite warnings from Moshe the Beadle about German prosecutions of Jews, Wiesel’s family and the other townspeople fail to flee the country before the German’s invade. As a result, the entire Jewish population is sent to concentration camps. There, in the Auschwitz death camp, Wiesel is separated from his mother and younger sister but remains with his father. As he struggles to survive against starvation, physical, emotional and spiritual abuse he also looses faith in God. As weeks and months pass, Wiesel battles a conflict between fighting to live for his father or letting him die, giving himself the best chance of survival. Over the course of the memoir, Wiesel’s father dies and he is left with a guilty conscience but a relieved heart because now he can just fend for himself and only himself. A few months later, the Allied soldiers free the lucky prisoners that are left. Although Wiesel survives the concentration camps, he leaves behind his own innocence and is forever haunted by the death and violence he had witnessed. Wiesel and the rest of the prisoners lived in fear every minute of every hour of every day and had to live in a place where there was not one single place that there was no danger of death. After reading Night and Wiesel’s acceptance speech of the Nobe...
Events that occur in the world around us shape our personalities. The experiences that a person lives through, both good and bad, have a direct relationship to that person’s growth as an individual. It could be argued that a person is the sum of their experiences, or more accurately the sum of their memories of those experiences. The memory of an experience does not always reflect the literal truth of what occurred, rather it will reflect how the experience affected the person who remembers it. Two different people who have the same experience can remember it in two very different ways. The differences in their memories will show how the experience affected them differently. An experience as large and life-changing as living through a war will affect a large number of people, who will each remember it and be changed by it in their own way. Literature written about such events will reflect the affected individuals and societies. Some of the effects of World War II on the average German person can be seen through an analysis of the different memories and experiences of the war represented in a selection of post World War II German literature including Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and Heinrich Böll’s And Where Were You, Adam?.
Miss Hancock, her personality and beliefs were contrasted entirely by her character foil, Charlotte’s mother, “this civilized, this clean, this disciplined woman.” All through Charlotte’s life, her mother dictated her every move. A “small child [was] a terrible test to that cool and orderly spirit.” Her mother was “lovely to look at, with her dark-blond hair, her flawless figure, her smooth hands. She never acted frazzled or rushed or angry, and her forehead was unmarked by age lines or worry. Even her appearance differed greatly to Miss Hancock, who she described as,” overdone, too much enthusiasm. Flamboyant. Orange hair.” The discrepancy between the characters couldn’t escape Charlotte’s writing, her metaphors. Her seemingly perfect mother was “a flawless, modern building, created of glass and the smoothest of pale concrete. Inside are business offices furnished with beige carpets and gleaming chromium. In every room there are machines – computers, typewriters, intricate copiers. They are buzzing and clicking way, absorbing and spitting out information with the speed of sound. Downstairs, at ground level, people walk in and out, tracking mud and dirt over the steel-grey tiles, marring the cool perfection of the building. There are no comfortable chairs in the lobby.” By description, her mother is fully based on ideals and manners, aloof, running her life with “sure and perfect control.” Miss
A story of a young boy and his father as they are stolen from their home in Transylvania and taken through the most brutal event in human history describes the setting. This boy not only survived the tragedy, but went on to produce literature, in order to better educate society on the truth of the Holocaust. In Night, the author, Elie Wiesel, uses imagery, diction, and foreshadowing to describe and define the inhumanity he experienced during the Holocaust.
woman she once knew. Both women only see the figure they imagine to be as the setting shows us this, in the end making them believe there is freedom through perseverance but ends in only despair.
A composer can create images dependant on the form of the language of texts to shape a responders understanding of the ideas and themes prompted by people and their experiences. The German film, ‘Run Lola Run’ written and directed by Tom Tykwer, focuses on the experiences of the protagonist Lola to explore the themes of the inevitable force of time, and the issue of freewill verses determinism. Similarly, Dorothea Mackellar, in her poem ‘My Country’, relies on her experiences of the Australian landscape to convey her love and passion for the country using the language of the distinctive visual.
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed”(Wiesel 32). Wiesel uses the symbolism of night to convey the death, the darkness, and the evils that started with the first night. In the memoir Night, Wiesel uses a distinct writing style to express what he went through, how he changed and how it affected the rest of his life, while in the concentration camps, during the Holocaust. He uses techniques like irony, imagery, symbolism, and a poetic syntax to describe his story of surviving the Holocaust. By applying these techniques, Wiesel projects a tone of bitterness, confusion and grief into his story. Through his writing Wiesel gives us a window into the complete abandonment of reason he adopted and lived in during the Holocaust.