If This Is Human Nature
In Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi uses characterization to describe human nature, showing the reader how human nature and the nature of Auschwitz contradict one another. Beginning with how human nature manifests to Levi and transitions into the harsh and fearful nature that develops of the prisoner’s in Auschwitz as it moves through the story.
Firstly, in Survival in Auschwitz Primo Levi begins to learn how our human nature manifests in the most desperate and nerve wracking of times. “Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are a few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.” (Levi 8) In this short excerpt Levi uses
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“Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that so survive, we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of everynight, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength, for it is the last -- the power to refuse our consent.” (Levi 39) Levi uses description to show the reader what he truly feels and what has been revealed about the camp. Their true intention, they have stripped down the borders of society, leaving them naked to only a simple form of civilization, as he states something similar in the quote. He illustrates his shuddersome experience with dread and scornful tone, this is conveyed by the concrete, if not abstract, diction in the quote such as, “We are slaves, deprived of everynight, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death…”. But nonetheless, there is still strength to his harrowing words, “... but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength, for it is the last -- the power to refuse our …show more content…
“Many people - many nations - can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason.” (Author's Preface, Levi) Levi uses allegory to not only illustrate the tense feeling of Auschwitz, but also the taut governments during World War Two. More so, during World War Two it was a very tense time. You did not know who you can and cannot trust. Moreover, the author uses characterization to pinpoint the mannerism of those who fall slave to the guards and barring walls of Auschwitz. He describes the strain of having no one to trust due to occurring events and the brain wracking of analysis on who to trust and who to not. The mental exhaustion one obtains from that is scarring. Levi emphasizes these points using a bitter, almost abhorring, tone to show the reader that he is vexed by coming to such a harsh
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.
All of Levi's experiences while he was in Auschwitz describe the dire need for human society to thrive off of each other like parasites within communities. The metaphor of the Nazis being parasitic pests to society and the Jews being their hosts capture this statement rather well. His details that he leaves us in his memoir carry on the stories and experiences of not only himself, but of all of the inocent men, women, and children who lost their lives during this horrific time in history. Levi also imposes that his experiences, as well as the experiences of others, will instill in his audience's minds through his usage of discreat language and graphic context which helped in creating accurate dipictions of his trials towards readers.
Six million Jews died during World War II by the Nazi army under Hitler who wanted to exterminate all Jews. In Night, Elie Wiesel, the author, recalls his horrifying journey through Auschwitz in the concentration camp. This memoir is based off of Elie’s first-hand experience in the camp as a fifteen year old boy from Sighet survives and lives to tell his story. The theme of this memoir is man's inhumanity to man. The cruel events that occurred to Elie and others during the Holocaust turned families and others against each other as they struggled to survive Hitler's and the Nazi Army’s inhumane treatment.
In Primo Levi’s Survival In Auschwitz, an autobiographical account of the author’s Holocaust experience, the concept of home takes on various forms and meanings. Levi writes about his experience as an Italian Jew during the Holocaust. We learn about his journey to Auschwitz, his captivity and his ultimate return home. This paper explores the idea of home throughout the work. As a concept, it symbolizes the past, the future and a part of Levi’s identity.
In Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, both authors explore the source of human violence and aggression. Sigmund Freud’s book reacts to the state of Europe after World War I, while Primo Levi’s narrative is a first-hand account of his experiences during World War II. International and domestic tensions are high when both works are written; Sigmund Freud adopts a pessimistic tone throughout the work, while Primo Levi evolves from a despairing approach to a more optimistic view during his time at Auschwitz. To Sigmund Freud, savagery comes from the natural state of human beings, while Primo Levi infers violence is rooted in individual’s humanity being stripped away is.
A prisoner in Auschwitz and a friend to Levi, Steinlauf, was a 40-year-old ex-Sargent of the Austro-Hungarian Army. Nonetheless he also was dealing with hunger, exhaustion, polluted water shortages, and trying to keep his humanity intact. He greets Levi in the washroom and notices that Levi explains he had began to see washing as a waste of energy and warmth because, “after half an hour with the coal sacks every difference between him and me will have disappeared.”(Levi, 40) Instead of washing he decides “to let myself live, to indulge myself in the luxury of an idle moment.”(Levi, 40) Steinlauf stops Levi explaining to him how important it is
...periences of a Holocaust survivor. Wiesel created the protagonist in order to represent some of Wiesel’s own experiences and thoughts and to also portray the other way of dealing with unpleasant memories. However, the protagonist and Wiesel are not one and the same. By incorporating fictional events and characters into this work, the author manages to gives insight into the mind of a Holocaust survivor without making the novel an autobiography of his own personal experiences. Through the protagonist, Elie Wiesel allows the reader to understand Eliezer and that he is still deeply haunted and disturbed by his experiences even years after he has been liberated. With his unfortunate past, it makes it hard for Eliezer to let go of his memories and guilt and move on in life.
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...
In Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi describes his time in the concentration camp. The depiction of Auschwitz, is gruesome and vile in the Nazi’s treatment of the captives being held, but especially in the treatment of its Jewish prisoners. A key proponent to the text is Levi’s will to live which is shown in various places in the text, however a thematic element to the will to live is the reference to Inferno by Dante. In particular, the Inferno aids Survival in Auschwitz in by adding another layer of context to the prisoner’s condition, which resembles hell, and Levi’s will to live paralleling the character, Dante.
Self-preservation is defined as the protection of oneself from harm or death, especially regarded as a base instinct in human beings and animals. It drives us to do things we otherwise would not do, to accomplish things we didn’t know were possible. Self-preservation can often be found throughout history and literature, always in the most desperate of times. Nowhere is it more prominent than in the history and literature surrounding the Holocaust, during which over six million Jews, including 1.5 million children, were brutally murdered in what has become known as one of history’s most deadly and widely publicized genocides. For almost 80 years, historians and Jewish survivors have authored and published
In Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Levi states that, "We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence" (87). He writes this memoir in part because he no longer feels the "driving necessity and physical disabilities," having escaped Auschwitz, he must not be silent any longer. Like many Holocaust survivors, Levi appears to write his memoir in order to share his experiences with the reader and in his great details, he seems to put together his past, devoting himself to his writing and only dying naturally after he has left his completed memoir. In many Holocaust memoirs, the authors have chosen not to include lavish emotion and grief; Levi, however, does express his emotions in each situation.
Primo Levi’s tales of his labors in “Survival in Auschwitz” connected Marx’s ideas with work under extreme and unique circumstances. In the Lager, workers suffered extreme working conditions, were deskilled in labor, became one with the masses, and were dehumanized. Through Marx’s four estrangements (estrangement of man from the product of his labor, estrangement of man from the act of labor, estrangement of man from humanity, and the estrangement of man from man), it became evident the ways in which the Holocaust is a product of a heightened version of capitalist modernity.
Thousands of people were sent to concentration camps during World War Two, including Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Many who were sent to the concentration camps did not survive but those who did tried to either forgot the horrific events that took place or went on to tell their personal experiences to the rest of the world. Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi wrote memoirs on their time spent in the camps of Auschwitz; these memoirs are called ‘Night’ and ‘Survival in Auschwitz’. These memoirs contain similarities of what it was like for a Jew to be in a concentration camp but also portray differences in how each endured the daily atrocities of that around them. Similarities between Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi’s memoirs can be seen in the proceedings that
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.
Primo Levi was an Italian Jewish Anti-fascist who was arrested in 1943, during the Second World War. The memoir, “If this is a Man”, written immediately after Levi’s release from the Auschwitz concentration camp, not only provides the readers with Levi’s personal testimony of his experience in Auschwitz, but also invites the readers to consider the implications of life in the concentration camp for our understanding of human identity. In Levi’s own words, the memoir was written to provide “documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind”. The lack of emotive words and the use of distant tone in Levi’s first person narration enable the readers to visualize the cold, harsh reality in Auschwitz without taking away the historical credibility. Levi’s use of poetic and literary devices such as listing, repetition, and symbolism in the removal of one’s personal identification; the use of rhetorical questions and the inclusion of foreign languages in the denial of basic human rights; the use of bestial metaphors and choice of vocabulary which directly compares the prisoner of Auschwitz to animals; and the use of extended metaphor and symbolism in the character Null Achtzehn all reveal the concept of dehumanization that was acted upon Jews and other minorities.