“Holding onto past memories helps humans avoid pain in the future. These experiences also help them make better decisions in the future.” (Kenny) Many people advise others to learn from the past and apply those memories so that you can effectively succeed by avoiding repeating past mistakes. On the contrary, people who get too caught up with the past are unable to move on to the future. Memories are the foundation of a person's mindset because what you make of them is entirely up to you. Alternatively, if you base your memories off of bad experiences you won’t be able to focus on the future, because you’re stuck in the past. In the article “Hope, Despair, and Memory” the author Elie Wiesel criticizes “... we could try to forget the past. Why not? Is it not natural for a human being to repress what causes him pain, what …show more content…
In the article “Hope, Despair, and Memory”, Elie Wiesel criticizes “ A young man struggles to readjust to life. His mother, his father, his small sister are gone. He is alone. On the verge of despair. And yet he does not give up. On the contrary, he strives to find a place among the living. He acquires a new language. He makes a few friends who, like himself, believe that the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil; that the memory of death will serve as a shield against death.” (Wiesel 163) In other words, Wiesel claims memory helps us to survive, forgetting allows us to go on living. In addition, knowing about our past and our present gives us wisdom to see into the future. According to a student essay from springboard the author recalls, “With barely any mental effort, memory helps us travel back in time to important events in our life; with its aid we can see our first day of high school, smell last winter's fire or taste yesterday’s lunch.” (Springboard 167) The author suggests that memory helps a person reminisce and look forward to the
Family and Adversity It is almost unimaginable the difficulties victims of the holocaust faced in concentration camps. For starters they were abducted from their homes and shipped to concentration camps in tightly packed cattle cars. Once they made it to a camp, a selection process occurred. The males were separated from the females.
Some traditions are passed down through generations. In a short story, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, a specific tradition is passed down to every generation. This generation was hated by most of the towns people ; those people said the tradition was an unfair and injustice act. Another act if injustice happened in Elie Wiesel’s short story “Hope, Despair, and Memory”. This quite from Elie Wiesel’s story shows how we must look at the unfairness. “Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s gift to his creatures, it is our gift to each other.” The short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson supports Wiesel’s central idea in “Hope, Despair, and Memory” by conveying similar central ideas with their use of pathos, the character’s perspective,
Their memories will give them an ideal live to go towards or a life in which they want to progress from. If an individual chooses to run from the past in which they lived, it is still a component in their life which shaped them to be who it is they became, despite their efforts to repress those memories. Nevertheless, the positive memories of an individual’s past will also shape who they are. Both good and bad memories are able to give an individual a glimpse into their ideal life and a target in which they wish to strive for and memories in which they can aim to prevent from happening once
...igher being, or achieving a lifetime goal. People can survive even in the most horrible of situations as long as they have hope and the will to keep fighting, but when that beacon begins to fade. They will welcome what ever ends their plight. The Holocaust is one of the greatest tragedies in human history. Elie Wiesel wrote this memoir in hopes that future generations don't forget the mistakes of the past, so that they may not repeat them in the future, even so there is still genocide happening today in places like Kosovo, Somalia, and Darfur, thousands of people losing their will to live because of the horrors they witness, if Elie Wiesel has taught us anything, it is that the human will is the weakest yet strongest of forces.
Although Wiesel and his father’s relationship starts out very distant, they are almost inseparable by the time his father dies. So many things bring them closer, and they push each other to stay alive. Once Wiesel’s father dies, nothing else matters to him anymore. He does not describe the three months between when his father died and when he was liberated because nothing could touch him anymore. His father was his only weak spot, and he had vanished. This completely traumatizes Wiesel and will remain imprinted in his mind forever. Eleven million innocent peoples’ lives were destroyed, which makes the holocaust arguably the worse event in the history of the world. Although this is only the story of Elie Wiesel, millions of others will be left a little footprint on this tragedy that will be remembered forever.
Oppression is the systematic method of prolonged cruelty and unjust treatment, often intended for those who are deemed “different” by a hierarchical society. It’s a basis that can be found in the plot of a fictional movie or novel, but most importantly, it’s an aspect of both past and modern life that has affected multiple nations. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, is a humanitarian who embodies the personal experiences of what being oppressed feels like – how it itches at one’s skin like the hatred and stares directed at them. The reason he is so important is because of his stories; what he has seen. The insight and intelligence he has brought forth further educates those who had previously accepted the world with their eyes closed.
The theme of Night is resilience. To be resilient is to be strong and able to bounce back when things happen. Elie shows resilience many times throughout the course of Night, and some of these times included when Elie and his block are being forced to run to the new camp, when somebody attempts to kill him and when he loses his father to sickness. When Elie is with the group of people running to the new camp, he knows that he needs to persevere and be resilient, even when the person that he is talking to gives up (Wiesel 86). Elie tries to tell somebody that they need to keep going, and that it will not be much longer, but when they give up, Elie does not seem to pity the boy, and he stays strong. Somebody also attempted to strangle Elie while
In the speech “Keep Memory Alive” by Elie Wiesel, the author is trying to inform his audience about the Holocaust while also trying to persuade them to keep fighting in keeping the memory alive. He does this by employing the rhetorical features of pathos, repetition and ethos throughout his speech in order to effectively persuade and inform.
Eliezer Wiesel loses his faith in god, family and humanity through the experiences he has from the Nazi concentration camp.
In ¨Hope, Despair, and Memory¨ a lecture by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel talks about a few significant memories. He is a holocaust survivor, he wrote this speech and won a Nobel Peace prize. He takes his readers back in time by using imagery. Some know, memory is a powerful tool, Wiesel uses this tool in this text. As you continue to read, think of where you would be without memory.
Elie Wiesel’s speech, Hope Despair and Memory gave in 1986 mainly focused on the great importance of remembering past memories that people tend to want to forget. The speech was very successful in persuading the audience to believe in the importance that memory serves us through the great use of pathos throughout the speech, especially the pathos that always comes from any sort of holocaust recollection. Elie uses such sentences as, “a young man struggles to readjust to life. His mother, his father, his small sister are gone. He is alone. On the verge of despair.”(Abrams, 1997) He helps to arise a strong sense of sympathy from the injustices that had plagued this time in history. This use of pathos makes it an effective use of it for it underlines the audience’s attention towards Elie Wiesel and makes them closer to his emotions an...
The first issue that needs to be addressed however is what exactly is memory? “ Without memory we would be servants of the moment, with nothing but our innate reflexes to help us deal with the world. There would be no language, no art, no science, no culture. Civilization itself is the distillation of human memory” (Blakemore 1988). The simple interpretation of Blakemore’s theory on what memory is that a person’s memory is at least one of the most important things in their life and without it civilization itself could not exist.
Memory is the tool we use to learn and think. We all use memory in our everyday lives. Memory is the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences. We all reassure ourselves that our memories are accurate and precise. Many people believe that they would be able to remember anything from the event and the different features of the situation. Yet, people don’t realize the fact that the more you think about a situation the more likely the story will change. Our memories are not a camcorder or a camera. Our memory tends to be very selective and reconstructive.
How can you be satisfied without remembering the significant memories in life? Memory is the way we function through our day-to-day lives. Without memory we wouldn’t be here today, it is something that you develop to learn overtime. Memory is fascinating and can function and improve in many ways. It is astonishing how we can remember a certain taste, smell, sounds, and objects over a long and short period of time. The memory is very complex and consists of many components. In this essay I will be informing you on how the human memory is critical in our everyday lives.
...Although there may be a few benefits to erasing a person’s memory, in the end it is wrong. Without their memories a person doesn’t have the chance to form their identity and without being able to learn from our mistakes, they will continue to be made. Being an adult with a blank slate isn’t right, and you can’t experience good things without also experiencing bad things.