Your boss is piling on the projects; you’re falling behind on bill payments; your mom is sick in the hospital. The everyday stresses keep adding up into a large imposing pile-- much like your laundry that hasn’t been done. Today’s society causes more stress than ever before, and people are suffering because of it; Increased health problems and a higher rate of suicide are both results of this stress. There are only two ways to handle stress: combat it with different techniques or give in and let it overtake your life. In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn explores the different techniques employed by prisoners as they try to survive the work camp. Solzhenstein differentiates the prisoners: those who give in to the …show more content…
Even Shukhov admits that “they were sure to get through camp alright” (50). These people turn against their conscience and commit crimes against their friends for their own benefit. Through Shukhov’s narrative, Solzhenstein portrays this as an act of losing their morals, which represents a loss of their individualism and the progress that the camp is making in breaking them down as a person. Maintaining one’s individual personality is the only goal that prisoners can have in the camp. Although most prisoners give into the camp conditions and change themselves to easier fit the camp, a few, like Shukhov, survive the camp by keeping their morals the same. Dinnertime in the gulag is a frenzied rush of prisoners scraping up every bit of the slush served as food. In the desperation and chaos that surrounds meal time, Shukhov finds a way to retain his manners by “[removing] his hat from his clean shaven head -- however cold it might be.” Because “ he could never bring himself to eat with his hat on,” , Shukhov shows his will to keep his own identity (10). , and keeps that part of him, the part that isn't stuck in a labor camp, alive. In this same setting, the rush for the prisoner’s …show more content…
Shukhov portrays the mental exhaustion that comes with working all day when he says “there is no time to start thinking,” (7) and that “the authorities do his thinking for him -- it was easier that way” (19). Even the freedom of thinking is restricted in the camps; many prisoners simply stop thinking -- effectively turning them into machines. In order to dodge this mentally devoid future, many prisoners exercise their minds as a form of distraction from the situation at hand. Alyosh, a religious prisoner, has a notebook with the bible copied into it. Unlike many prisoners, Alyosh looks on the positive side of things and appreciates his time. In one instance, he “looked happy, a smile on his lips…” (20) while walking to the worksite. Shukhov describes the religious groups as “[shedding] the hardships of camp life like water off of a duck’s back” (20). The use of simile to compare the two emphasizes the effectiveness of religion as a coping device. Alyosh urges Shukhov to resist the temptation for earthly wants, like bread and freedom, and instead encourages him to pray for salvation from God. Alyosh’s obsession with religion allows him to ignore the repressive conditions he is living in and gives him a positive focus in life. This distraction from the misery of his life gives him a chance at surviving in the gulags. This same method of distraction is applied by other prisoners in the camp.
Irish Playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once said, “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” Inhumanity is mankind’s worse attribute. Every so often, ordinary humans are driven to the point were they have no choice but to think of themselves. One of the most famous example used today is the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night demonstrates how fear is a debilitating force that causes people to lose sight of who they once were. After being forced into concentration camps, Elie was rudely awakened into reality. Traumatizing incidents such as Nazi persecution or even the mistreatment among fellow prisoners pushed Elie to realize the cruelty around him; Or even the wickedness Elie himself is capable of doing. This resulted in the loss of faith, innocence, and the close bonds with others.
Being confined in a concentration camp was beyond unpleasant. Mortality encumbered the prisons effortlessly. Every day was a struggle for food, survival, and sanity. Fear of being led into the gas chambers or lined up for shooting was a constant. Hard labor and inadequate amounts of rest and nutrition took a toll on prisoners. They also endured beatings from members of the SS, or they were forced to watch the killings of others. “I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time” (Night Quotes). Small, infrequent, rations of a broth like soup left bodies to perish which in return left no energy for labor. If one wasn’t killed by starvation or exhaustion they were murdered by fellow detainees. It was a survival of the fittest between the Jews. Death seemed to be inevitable, for there were emaciated corpses lying around and the smell...
A reality where the prisoner is dehumanized and have their rights and mental health abused. “I have endured lockdowns in buildings with little or no heat; lockdowns during which authorities cut off the plumbing completely, so contraband couldn’t be flushed away; and lockdowns where we weren’t allowed out to shower for more than a month” (Hopkins 154). A prisoner currently must survive isolation with improper shelter in the form of heat. Issues compound with a lack of running water and bathing, a proven severe health danger, especially for someone lacking proper nutrients such as a prisoner in lockdown. These abuses of physical well being then manifest into damage of prisoners’ mental well being. “Perhaps I should acknowledge that the lockdown-and, indeed, all these years-have damaged more than I want to believe” (Hopkins 156). Even for the experienced prisoner the wrath of unethically long lockdowns still cause mental damage. Each and every isolation period becomes another psychological beating delivered as the justice system needlessly aims to damage the already harmed inmates. The damage is so profound inmates even recognize the harm done to them by their jailors. An armed and widely used psychological weapon, the elongated lockdown procedures decimate mental health each and every time
Intro with Thesis: A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that documents totalitarian communism through the eyes of an ordinary prisoner in a Soviet labor camp. This story describes the protagonist, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, as he freezes and starves with the other prisoners, trying to survive the remainder of his ten-year sentence. In this story, Solzhenitsyn uses the struggles in the camp as a way to represent the defaults of the Soviet Union under Stalin’s regime. By doing this, Solzhenitsyn uses authoritative oppression in his labour camps to demonstrate the corrupt nature of the Soviet system.
The SS officers refer to the prisoners as animals: ““Faster you filthy dogs!” We were no longer marching, we were running. Like automatons. The SS were running as well, weapons in hand” (85). The officers do not hesitate to make such degrading, animalistic remarks. Non-chalantly, the officers differentiate themselves from the prisoners through their speech as well as their actions. Even Wiesel recognizes that his fellow inmates have lost their human identity because of the pain and violence they suffer from. He recounts, “Abruptly, our doors opened. Strange-looking creatures, dressed in striped jackets and black pants, jumped into the wagon” (28). Wiesel’s first impression of the prisoners are that they cannot be human; they are all dressed alike, and Wiesel’s observations lead him to believe that they have lost their human identity and are nothing but creatures. The prisoners, due to their inhumane status, are forced to go without sufficient amounts of food. Wiesel describes the violent fight that ensues when a few scraps of bread are tossed in a crowded wagon, “Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The worker watched the spectacle with great interest” (100). While the men fighting for the food demonstrate their selfish survival instincts, more disturbingly, the worker enjoys watching. Wiesel is able to confirm the loss of humanity as he witnesses
Solzhenitsyn uses many techniques and skills in his book to portray an accurate representation of “anyman.” The first of these is Shukov’s meager means of endurance. In the book there are many prisoners and workers in the camp and they are all connected by one thing: the need for survival. Of course, there is no one way to survive and as the people in the camp live out their days in prison they must each figure out how they will endure.
This novel and film commentary analysis or interpretation will be first summarised and then critiqued. The summary will be divided into twenty- four episodes. While summarising it is well to remember that the film was made out of the book.
In the Stanford Prison Experiment, a study done with the participation of a group of college students with similar backgrounds and good health standing who were subjected to a simulated prison environment. The participants were exposed completely to the harsh environment of a real prison in a controlled environment with specific roles of authority and subordinates assigned to each individual. The study was formulated based on reports from Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky had spent four years in a Siberian prison and his view on how a man is able to withstand anything after experiencing the horrors of prison prompted Dr. Philip Zimbardo a Professor of Psychology at Stanford and his
Following the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would start what would become two of the worst genocides in world history. These totalitarian governments would “welcome” people all across Europe into a new domain. A domain in which they would learn, in the utmost tragic manner, the astonishing capabilities that mankind possesses. Nazis and Soviets gradually acquired the ability to wipe millions of people from the face of the Earth. Throughout the war they would continue to kill millions of people, from both their home country and Europe. This was an effort to rid the Earth of people seen as unfit to live in their ideal society. These atrocities often went unacknowledged and forgotten by the rest of the world, leaving little hope for those who suffered. Yet optimism was not completely dead in the hearts of the few and the strong. Reading Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi help one capture this vivid sense of resistance toward the brutality of the German concentration and Soviet work camps. Both Bardach and Levi provide a commendable account of their long nightmarish experience including the impact it had on their lives and the lives of others. The willingness to survive was what drove these two men to achieve their goals and prevent their oppressors from achieving theirs. Even after surviving the camps, their mission continued on in hopes of spreading their story and preventing any future occurrence of such tragic events. “To have endurance to survive what left millions dead and millions more shattered in spirit is heroic enough. To gather the strength from that experience for a life devoted to caring for oth...
Solzhenitsyn believed that it was nearly impossible to have truly free thoughts under the prison camp conditions described in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, or in any situation where there is an authoritarian ruler. In a pris...
A crucial concept developed throughout Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved is the process of “the demolition of a man” through useless acts of violence. In order for the Nazis to control and murder without regard or guilt, they had to diminish men into subhumans. Those who entered the camps were stripped of their dignity and humanity, devoid of any personal identity. Men and women were reduced to numbers in a system that required absolute submission, which placed them in an environment where they had to struggle to survive and were pitted against their fellow prisoners. The purpose of the camps were not merely a place for physical extermination, but a mental one as well. Primo Levi exposes these small and large acts of deprivation and destruction within his two texts in order for readers to become aware of the affects such a system has on human beings, as well as the danger unleashed by a totalitarian system.
As World War II occurred, the Jewish population suffered a tremendous loss and was treated with injustice and cruelty by the Nazi’s seen through examples in the book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Victor Frankl records his experiences and observations during his time as prisoner at Auschwitz during the war. Before imprisonment, he spent his leisure time as an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, Austria and was able to implement his analytical thought processes to life in the concentration camp. As a psychological analyst, Frankl portrays through the everyday life of the imprisoned of how they discover their own sense of meaning in life and what they aspire to live for, while being mistreated, wrongly punished, and served with little to no food from day to day. He emphasizes three psychological phases that are characterized by shock, apathy, and the inability to retain to normal life after their release from camp. These themes recur throughout the entirety of the book, which the inmates experience when they are first imprisoned, as they adapt as prisoners, and when they are freed from imprisonment. He also emphasizes the need for hope, to provide for a purpose to keep fighting for their lives, even if they were stripped naked and treated lower than the human race. Moreover, the Capos and the SS guards, who were apart of the secret society of Hitler, tormented many of the unjustly convicted. Although many suffered through violent deaths from gas chambers, frostbites, starvation, etc., many more suffered internally from losing faith in oneself to keep on living.
The novel focuses on one man, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, as he tries to survive another day in the Soviet Union with dignity and compassion. The action takes place at a prison camp in Russia in the northeastern region called Ekibastuz. The location is pounded by snow, ice and winds of appalling and shocking force during winter and lasted for many weeks. The camp is very isolated as it consists double rows of barbed wire fencing around the entire area, making sure it is fully concealed and private, so that no prisoners can escape. The conditions of the camp are very harsh. It is a union where camp prisoners have to earn their food by working hard in their inadequate clothing during the extremely cold weather. Living conditions are almost unbearable; heavy mattresses do not include sheets, as an alternative it is stuffed with sawdust, prisoners only eat two hundred grams of bread per meal and guards would force prisoners to remove their clothing for body searches at temperatures of forty below zero. The building walls are covered in dull and monotonous white paint and it was untidy and unpleasant. “It’s constant chaos, constant crowds and constant confusion” shows that ceilings are most likely coated with frost and men at the tables are packed as tight and it was always crowded. Rats would diddle around the food store, because of the incredibly unhygienic and filthy environment the camp is and it was so insanitary that some men would die from horrible diseases. “Men trying to barge their way through with full trays” suggests that the living conditions are very harsh indeed and mealtimes would be chaotic, as every famished men would be rushing to receive food. However, not only did the place cause the prisoners to suffer and lose their...
Using his quick thinking and adaptability, Vladek Spiegelman is able to endure the war and make a life for himself. While in the camps, Vladek Spiegelman must adjust to the situation and quickly learn how to survive, not just physically but mentally as well. He immediately grasps that in order to withstand the camps, he must ration his food. Telling Artie Spiegelman about his consumption habits, Vladek
If This Is a Man or Survival in Auschwitz), stops to exist; the meanings and applications of words such as “good,” “evil,” “just,” and “unjust” begin to merge and the differences between these opposites turn vague. Continued existence in Auschwitz demanded abolition of one’s self-respect and human dignity. Vulnerability to unending dehumanization certainly directs one to be dehumanized, thrusting one to resort to mental, physical, and social adaptation to be able to preserve one’s life and personality. It is in this adaptation that the line distinguishing right and wrong starts to deform. Primo Levi, a survivor, gives account of his incarceration in the Monowitz- Buna concentration camp.