"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards" written by Søren Kierkegaard, states the irony which are peoples lives. They have to live their life knowing they can not understand it. The present of a person's life is very confusing, but in the end; he or she will look back and see how all the different events of his or her life fits together like a puzzle. In the memoir (italicizes) Night, by Elie Weisel and the biography (italicizes) The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, the veracity of this quote can be proven by irony and repetition. From Elie, the reader sees the repetition and irony of events in which Elie is constantly struggling for his own life and dignity. Through Deborah's struggles the reader see the irony of how scientists …show more content…
In Night, the reader is shown the repetition of many similar events in which Elie is struggling for his own life's meaning. At the young age of 15, Elie is already struggling for his life. This is very ironic because at 15 teens are starting to live their lives and here is Elie struggling day to day to keep his life. He's starving every day and can't understanding of why it is, when he sees the Kampo who is very plump. Does the Kampo not see the skeletons of people he is keeping prisoner? Everyday this repeats and repeats and yet there is no explanation to what his is going through. The reader sees him watch a young boy hanged and because of his weight he takes a half an hour to die. Where is God and the only answer he can come up with is he's hanging in the gallows with the boy. He tries to see the future we cannot see anything but his own hunger and future work and pain. He feels lost and hungry this theme is repeated throughout. But the reader sees that he doesn't only hunger food but the knowledge of what is happening at this time and why. However,
ILofHL Pages 56-86 Summary The book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is the result of years of research done by Skloot on an African American woman with cervical cancer named Henrietta Lacks. Cells from Lacks’ tumor are taken and experimented on without her knowledge. These cells, known as HeLa cells, are the first immortal human cells ever grown. The topic of HeLa cells is at the center of abundantly controversial debates.
Elie’s loss of innocence and childhood lifestyle is very pronounced within the book, Night. This book, written by the main character, Elie Wiesel, tells the readers about the experiences of Mr. Wiesel during the Holocaust. The book starts off by describing Elie’s life in his hometown, Sighet, with his family and friends. As fascism takes over Hungary, Elie and his family are sent north, to Auschwitz concentration camp. Elie stays with his father and speaks of his life during this time. Later, after many stories of the horrors and dehumanizing acts of the camp, Elie and his father make the treacherous march towards Gliewitz. Then they are hauled to Buchenwald by way of cattle cars in extremely deplorable conditions, even by Holocaust standards. The book ends as Elie’s father is now dead and the American army has liberated them. As Elie is recovering in the hospital he gazes at himself in a mirror, he subtly notes he much he has changed. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie loses his innocence and demeanour because he was traumatized by what he saw in the camps, his loss of faith in a God who stood idly by while his people suffered, and becoming selfish as he is forced to become selfish in the death camps to survive.
In the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the author displays the transformation and the evolution of the average human being, through a horrible experience that he personally went through. When he is transported from one place to another, forced to leave everything behind, to go live in the ghettos, then in a horrible concentration camp. In the concentration camp, Elie experiences numerous events that challenge his physical and mental limits. Some of these events made him question his faith, and whether there is such a thing as God, turning him from a conservative Jew to a reform Jew. Elie doesn’t love the concentration camps, yet he doesn’t hate it, in fact he does not care anymore.
It is so strenuous to be faithful when you are a walking cadaver and all you can think of is God. You devote your whole life to Him and he does not even have the mercy set you free. At the concentration camp, many people were losing faith. Not just in God, but in themselves too. Elie Wiesel uses many literary devices, including tone, repetition and irony to express the theme, loss of faith. He uses tone by quoting men at the camp and how they are craving for God to set them free. He also uses repetition. He starts sentences with the same opening, so that it stays in the reader’s head. Finally, he uses irony to allude to loss of faith. Elie understands how ironic it is to praise someone so highly, only to realize they will not have mercy on you. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses tone, repetition and irony illustrate the loss of faith the prisoners were going through.
During the Holocaust many people were severely tortured and murdered. The holocaust caused the death of six million Jewish people, as well as the death of 5 million non-Jewish people. All of the people, who died during this time, died because of the Nazis’: a large hate group composed of extremely Ignoble, licentious, and rapacious people. They caused the prisoners to suffer physically and mentally; thus, causing them to lose all hope of ever being rescued. In the novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, Elie went through so much depression, and it caused him to struggle with surviving everyday life in a concentration camp. While Elie stayed in the concentration camp, he saw so many people get executed, abused, and even tortured. Eventually, Elie lost all hope of surviving, but he still managed to survive. This novel is a perfect example of hopelessness: it does not offer any hope. There are so many pieces of evidence that support this claim throughout the entire novel. First of all, many people lost everything that had value in their life; many people lost the faith in their own religion; and the tone of the story is very depressing.
...e has to deal with the death of his family, the death of his innocence, and the death of his God at the very young age of fifteen. He retells the horrors of the concentration camp, of starvation, beatings, torture, illness, and hard labor. He comes to question how God could let this happen and to redefine the existence of God in the concentration camp. This book is also filled with acts of kindness and compassion amid the degradation and violence. It seems that for every act of violence that is committed, Elie counteracts with some act of compassion. Night is a reflection on goodness and evil, on responsibility to family and community, on the struggle to forge identity and to maintain faith. It shows one boy's transformation from spiritual idealism to spiritual death via his journey through the Nazi's failed attempt to conquer and erase a people and their faith.
The novel “Night” tells the story of Elie and his family in World War II. The family get separated and Elie is only left with his father. The reason Elie is affected so deeply by his father’s death is because his father is all he has left and he broke his promise to not follow the actions of the Rabbi’s son.
In the novel Night, Elie Wiesel faces the horrors of the Holocaust, where he loses many friends and family, and almost his life. He starts as a kind young boy, however, his environment influences many of the decisions he makes. Throughout the novel, Elie Wiesel changes into a selfish boy, thinks of his father as a liability and loses his faith in God as an outcome his surroundings.
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 final moments of Night, Elie has been broken down to only the most basic ideas of humanity; survival in it of itself has become the only thing left for him to cling to. After the chain of unfortunate events that led to his newfound solitude after his father’s abrupt death, Elie “thought only to eat. [He] thought not of [his] father, or [his] mother” (113). He was consumed with the ideas of survival, so he repeatedly only expressed his ideas of gluttony rather than taking the time to consider what happened to his family. The stress of survival allocated all of Elie’s energy to that cause alone. Other humanistic feelings like remorse, love, and faith were outcast when they seemed completely unimportant to his now sole goal of survival. The fading of his emotions was not sudden mishap though; he had been worn away with time. Faith was one of the most prominent key elements in Elie’s will to continue, but it faded through constant. During the hanging of a young boy Elie heard a man call to the crowd pleading, “Where is merciful God, where is He?” (64). It snapped Elie’s resolve. From this point on, he brought up and questioned his faith on a regular basis. Afterwards, most other traits disappeared like steam after a fire is extinguished. Alone in the wet embers the will to survive kept burning throughout the heart ache. When all else is lost, humans try to survive for no reason other than to survive, and Wiesel did survive. He survived with mental scars that persisted the ten long years of his silence. Even now after his suffering has, Elie continues to constantly repeat the word never throughout his writing. To write his memoir he was forced to reopen the lacerations the strains of survival left inside his brain. He strongly proclaims, “Never shall I forget that night...Never shall I forget the smoke...Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the
In Night by Elie Wiesel, the main theme of chapter four is survival. After being beaten to near death, a young French woman tells Elie, “Bite your lips little brother… Don’t cry. Keep your anger, your hate, for another day, for later. The day will come but not now… Wait. Clench your teeth and wait” (Wiesel 53). In order to survive Elie must save his anger, so the young French woman helps calm Elie down. This quote show evidence that the main theme of chapter four is survival. While speaking to Elie, Franek says, “I knew it, I knew that I would win, kid. Better late than never, And because you made me wait, it will also cost you a ration of bread. A ration of bread for one of my pals, a famous dentist from Warshaw. To pay him for pulling out your crown” (56). In order to survive, Elie must give up his golden crown, and a ration of his own bread. This quote shows evidence that the theme of chapter four is survival. While the prisoners line up for roll call, a Kapo says, “ An ordinary inmate does not have the right to mix into other people’s affairs. One of you does not seem to have understood this point. I shall therefore try to make him understand clearly, once and for all” (57). After Elie gets caught spying on the Kapo, he gets beat for breaking the rules. These quotes show clear evidence that the main theme of chapter four is
In Night, it is discovered that atrocities and cruel treatment can make decent people into brutes. Elie himself also shows signs of becoming a brute for his survival, but escapes this fate, which is shown through his interactions with his father. Firstly, Elie’s moral side, overcoming the temptation to be a brute, is shown through his love for his father. However, despite these thoughts, he still decided to support his father, which helps him detour away from the path to being a brute.
When people are placed in difficult, desolate situations, they often change in a substantial way. In Night by Elie Wiesel, the protagonist, Elie, is sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp where he undergoes many devastating experiences. Due to these traumatic events, Elie changes drastically, losing his passion in God, becoming disconnected with his father, and maturing when it matters most.
Night by Elie Wiesel is a very sad book. The struggle that Eliezer endured is similar to one that we all face. Eliezer’s was during the holocaust. Ours can be during any period of life. If we set our priorities in our hearts, nothing can change them except ourselves. Night is a prime example of this inner struggle and the backwards progress that is possible with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It teaches that the mind truly is “over all.” As Frankl wrote, “Man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate,” no matter what the circumstance.
What lengths should one go to in order to survive? This is a question which has challenged the human race for generations and to which no satisfactory answer exists. In the modern world, this issue is examined theoretically, but rarely confronts individuals, with the exception of the most destitute. However, in harsh environments and forbidding territories, this matter becomes very real and pressing. Nature pays no attention to the arbitrary emotions of man, demanding only the forfeiture of the sorrowfully short life granted to him. Many would argue that in order to delay the inevitable conclusion awaiting every man, humans must act upon their primal intuition rather than their emotions. Jack London’s “The Law of Life” includes this naturalistic viewpoint that human survival instinct drives individuals more than feelings or compassion. London shows this through his protagonist Old Koshkoosh’s past experiences and tribal upbringing, his view on life, and the actions of his family members.