A majority of people would presuppose that for one's personality to evolve, it would occur over a length of time. In Maxine Kumin's "Woodchucks," eyes are opened to express how easily anyone could transform within moments when the narrator hunts the woodchucks. Instead of murdering the woodchucks in silence, Kumin arrives to the point where she must pursue them herself and exterminate them, even though she claims to be a pacifist. A transformation transpires once she discovers the thrill of shooting a .22 gun, assassinating the woodchucks one-by-one. Numerous readers believe the poem is only referring to the heinous deaths the Nazis inflicted onto the Jews during the Holocaust from the Nazis; however, Kumin is indeed revealing how effortlessly one can truly transform from a pure mind to a cold heart.
At the beginning, she presents herself as if she is conflicted as to whether or not she yearns to kill the woodchucks by the means of a gun. As she handles the .22 gun, Kumin experiences the thrill of the "bullets neat noses," holding an item that causes harm to others. During this moment, she discovers how exhilarating it is to work with a gun considering it is unlikely that she has ever utilized one before this moment. Toward the conclusion, Kumin wishes
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After murdering one of the babies, she expresses that "the murderer inside me rose up hard/ the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith." Within that moment, Kumin was no longer herself, for she was now a warmonger, lustful for the blood of every woodchuck encompassing the area; however, only after exterminating a mere three woodchucks did she reveal her antagonist side. She also describes herself as "a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace," aware of the transformation that underwent; all it took was a slight amount of minutes to evolve from a humble pacifist to a sadistic
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.
The poem “Woodchucks” by Maxine Kumin, is about the narrator’s attempt to eradicate woodchucks from a garden. The figurative message of the poem is how a person can change from good to evil effortlessly. The metaphor of the Holocaust is intertwined in the poem and helps enhance the figurative message. The uniform format and the implication of Kumin’s word choices creates a framework that allows the reader to draw out deeper meanings that the literary devices create. Maxine Kumin’s use of an undeviating format, word choice, and allusion to the Holocaust reinforces the purpose of her poem.
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.
In her younger ages, she used a gun for entertainment, she loved to hunt with her father. The author was educated and taught about guns, by her father because of the unsaddling event of her grandmother and mother on highway 66 when the three men that were trying to run them off the road for the large cash amount that was used for cashing payroll checks for the miners. As she got older her gun was there for protection and security. She was more assured with it that she would be able to protect herself.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald writes “He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized”. This idea of how people could become almost unimaginably cruel due to dehumanization corresponds with the Jews experience in the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the ruthless massacre of Jewish people, and other people who were consider to be vermin to the predetermined Aryan race in the 1940s. One holocaust survivor and victim was Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of Night. Wiesel was one of the countless people to go through the horrors of the concentration camps, which dehumanized people down to their animalistic nature, an echo of their previous selves. Dehumanization worsens over time in Night because of how the Jews treated each other, and how Elie changed physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Niska is rebellious, wild, strong, a character easy to love. She is born as the daughter of a Windigo killer and has seen much before she has grown. When a priest notices a young wild girl still wander Moose Factory, he comes to take Niska, she runs wild and even bites the priest. “I fought like a lynx then...” (Boyden, 92). Niska is resilient and gutsy throughout her time at the Residential School. When her hair is being cut, the nun cuts hers shorter than the other girls for a simple fact of disliking the young free child. Niska sneaks in the night and cuts the rest of her hair off and is thrown into a sort of solitary confinement for weeks and is fed only once a day. Niska states she never regrets her actions and when her mother comes to break her out is it clear that she has learned from a family of brave and courageous people. They take off into the forest and Niska is once again at ease,“Slowly becoming wild like the animals around us” (Boyden,
Never.” is what a man that had his sister, mother and father murdered and survivor of the Holocaust wrote how the first day at a concentration camp effected him for the rest of his life. Elie Wiesel wrote the book Night describing how he changed from a boy who was religious and caring to the exact opposite because of the ordeals he went through during the Holocaust. Before the nightmares that he endured he basicly an average innocent boy living during WWII.
Each and every one of us sees the world in a different light than each other. These differences in perception are not completely random. Everyone’s perception of the world around us is affected by certain factors. Both the autobiographical memoir, Night, by Elie Wiesel, and the poem, “We grow accustomed to the Dark,” by Emily Dickinson, demonstrate a magnitude of factors affecting how we see the world. Night depicts Wiesel’s journey throughout the Holocaust, while “We grow accustomed to the Dark” exhibits our journeys when encountering new obstacles. Based on the universal concept of “How We See Things,” two factors that affect our perception of the world around us are our upbringings and our experiences when facing new obstacles due to the
Hawaii is such a diverse and unique area that it is said to be a biologist’s paradise. Biologists travel here to study the wide variety of species and one such species is Aleurites moluccana or the kukui tree. The kukui tree is originally from Southeast Asia, particularly the Indo-Malaysia region, and has moved its way into the Pacific. It was first introduced to the Hawaiian islands when the Polynesians navigated their way here hundreds of years ago (Elevitch, C. R., & Manner, H. I., 2006). Since then, the kukui tree’s physical adaptations have helped it to thrive in Hawaii and native Hawaiians were able to utilize this plant in a number of ways.
reading the account). This chapter is unique because of the graphic terms used here to describe the vivid and horrifying details of Grandfather’s experiences during the bombing raids in Dresden. Matthew Mullins (a doctoral student and instructor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro) notes that “Nowhere in the text does Oskar or any of the characters describe the horror of 9/11 in [such] graphic terms [as] used in both the account of the Japanese woman after Hiroshima and in Thomas Schell’s post-Dresden account” (Mullins 315-16). Among other traumatic experiences of that event, Grandfather morbidly outlines the actions he took in order to find his beloved Anna amidst the rubble that covered Dresden like blackened snow. He gruesomely describes how he was forced to kill animals in the zoo, as the zoo keeper begged him to do for him, as his own vision was burnt. Grandfather’s love for Anna and knowledge of their baby was enough motivation for him to leave his own begging parents. He burnt his hand on the
The author illustrated his characters as different types of animals where in the Jews are represented as mice and the Germans as cats. This representation proposes how the Jews facing the Nazis are as helpless as a mouse caught by a cat. The first part for instance, is introduced by a quotation from Hitler in which he deprives the Jewish race of human qualities by reducing them to a mere vermin: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race but they are not human: (Spiegelman I, 4).
Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish people’s outlook on life. Wiesel’s identity transformed dramatically throughout the narrative. “How old he had grown the night before! His body was completely twisted, shriveled up into itself. His eyes were petrified, his lips withered, decayed.
The Holocaust took place during World War II, when Adolf Hitler became the dictator of Germany in 1933. Would your identity change, if you were put through an epidemic. In the first section of the book, Eliezer Wiesel is a twelve year old boy who studies Judaism, but he wants to study Kabbalah, Wiesel described himself as faithful religious man. However, throughout Night, the evolution of Wiesel’s religious beliefs, symbolizes the struggle of the Holocaust.
He brings up the topic of love, and talks about his recent divorce. Zoe shares her sympathies, but he claims that love is like a tree. It has bumps and bruises, but it is still growing. Zoe shares a love story of her own, about a woman who plays the violin in Europe. When she moves back to America, she stops playing and takes up with a local boy. He tells her that she is not famous and the no one has ever heard of her, then she goes home and puts a bullet through her head. This story perturbs Earl, and he quickly gets off the subject of love. He tells Zoe that she should wear more blue and white to bring out her coloring, which she responds negatively to. Earl says that he should not have even tried to be with a career woman, as they are all too stricken. He prefers women with part-time jobs. Still on the balcony, he talks more and more about the limited population of good women, and that there are none left for men to be with. All of his actions thus far--his outrageous costume, his opinions about women with careers--angers Zoe and reflects her earlier experiences with not being good enough for men. She steps behind Earl, who is leaning over the railing, and gives him a shove. His arms fall over, but he catches himself. After this he is quite shaken, and yells at her in confusion. Zoe repeats that she was just kidding several times, and the story closes with her smiling at him and wondering
“I'm not talking about YOUR book now, but look at how many books have already been written about the Holocaust. What's the point? People haven't changed... Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust.” These words were spoken by author Art Spielgelman. Many books have been written about the Holocaust; however, only one book comically describes the non-superficial characteristics of it. Art Spiegelman authors a graphic novel titled Maus, a book surrounding the life a Jewish man living in Poland, named Vladek. His son, Art Spielgelman, was primarily focused on writing a book based on his father’s experiences during the Holocaust. While this was his main focus, his book includes unique personal experiences, those of which are not commonly described in other Holocaust books. Art’s book includes the troubles his mother, Anja, and his father, Vladek, conquered during their marriage and with their family; also, how his parents tried to avoid their children being victimized through the troubles. The book includes other main characters, such as: Richieu Spiegelman, Vladek first son; Mala Spiegelman, Vladek second wife; and Françoise, Art’s French wife. Being that this is a graphic novel, it expresses the most significant background of the story. The most significant aspect about the book is how the characters are dehumanized as animals. The Jewish people were portrayed as mice, the Polish as pigs, the Germans (Nazis in particular) as cats, and Americans as dogs. There are many possible reasons why Spiegelman uses animals instead of humans. Spiegelman uses cats, dogs, and mice to express visual interests in relative relationships and common stereotypes among Jews, Germans, and Americans.