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Essay about jealousy and envy
envy meaning in essay
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"Envy": Cynthiz Ozick Meets Melanie Klein
Cynthia Ozick’s story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” shows the corrosive effects
of envy on the life of the lonely, aging Yiddish poet Edelshtein. Edelshtein is consumed
with envy of Ostrover, a famous Yiddish novelist known from English translations of his
stories. He feels that Ostrover has both cuckolded him and bested him in literary
success. Edelshtein believes he could become as famous as Ostover if he too had a
translator into English. Without the translator, he fears his poems will die along with
him and the dying Yiddish language. The story seems to illustrate the psychological
insights of Melanie Klein about the unconscious mechanisms behind envy: “I consider
that envy is an oral-sadistic and anal-sadistic expression of destructive impulses,
operative from the beginning of life. . .” (Klein, ix). So long as Edelshtein operates out
of envy, he will remain caught in a vicious cycle, in an infantile, self-destructive state,
thwarted in his attempts to love or to be creative. He will continue to feel persecuted by
Ostrover, which is really a form of internal persecution. As Klein says, “When this
occurs, the good object is felt to be lost, and with it inner security” ( 84).
“Envy,” which is included in Ozick’s 1969 collection, The Pagan Rabbi, is
reminiscent of Bellow’s Herzog (1965). Both are profound psychological anatomies,
detailed dissections of a single suffering character, a victim who is nevertheless in
many ways his own worst enemy. Both stories are delicately poised between the comic
and the tragic. Both protagonists are intellectuals who rail against the “Wasteland
outlook” and defend Jewish humanism. Herzog rejects “the commonplaces of the
Wastela...
... middle of paper ...
...at least two people”
(Klein 6). Tragedy occurs in the realm of oedipal conflict, but the envious person never
reaches that stage and thus never really grows up.
Works Cited
Bellow, Saul. Herzog. 1965; New York: Viking, 1976.
Cohen, Sarah Blacher. Cynthia Ozick’s Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Kauvar, Elaine M. Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993.
Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude: A Study of Unconscious Sources. NY: Basic
Books, 1957.
Lowin, Joseph. Cynthia Ozick. Boston: Twayne, 1988.
Ozick, Cynthia. “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” Jewish American Stories. Ed. Irving
Howe. New York: New American Library, 1977: 129-77.
Strandberg, Victor. Greek Mind/Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.
controls or around him for a long period of time, the least punishment he will get is being exiled
Ludwig Tieck’s novella, Eckbert the Fair, presents a certain ambiguity of moral values. The story meets a tragic ending where the main couple of the fairytale, Eckbert and Bertha, die as punishment for their crimes of betrayal, theft, and murder. However, an uneasy feeling of injustice remains about the punishment despite the clarity of their guilt. The tale itself strongly resembles a tragic play defined by Aristotle, but the narrative deviates from the structure of standard tragedy. In effect, the unique set-up of the narrative makes the evil deeds seem ultimately inevitable. The structure of the novella helps justifying the crimes, causing the distinction between the good and the bad to become unclear. In this paper, I will discuss this unique structure of the tale to analyze how this uneasy feeling about the ending emerges.
In his memoir “Night”, Elie Wiesel recalls his experience leading up to, in the middle of, and immediately following his forced servitude during the Holocaust. One of the most remarkable parts of Wiesel’s story is the dehumanization that occurs over the course of his imprisonment. In a system built to take away the identity of its subjects, Elie constantly grapples with his sense of self during the Holocaust and even finds himself lost by the end of the book. This loss of innocence and selfhood is a key element of Elie’s physical, emotional, and spiritual journey throughout the story.
...m to hate the world and soon make the Media Luna into a desert. He is willing to continue his cruelty but he knows that it will ultimately get back to him, it will cost him and most importantly, he will have consequences. The deaths that were caused in his world ruined him, ruined his want to feel emotions or change. The deaths in his childhood and adulthood made him indifferent to the emotions that he was feeling.
...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.
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.
Sollod, R. N., Wilson, J. P., & Monte, C. F. (2009). Defending Against Envy: The Most Deadly of Sins. Beneath the Mask; an introduction to theories of personality (p. 233). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. (Original work published 2003).
The speaker now only wants to leave his desire, since he had sacrificed his sanity, a price that was far too high for desires. With Sidney’s end of irony as the solution to the madness that desire had brought upon the speaker, it establish that the want of material things should be tossed out and internal rewards should be kept. One should only desire to “kill desire” (14 Sidney).
“The shock of this terrible awakening stayed with us for a long time” (Wiesel 818). The short story Night, by Elie Wiesel portrays the hardships of the nights he spent in the Holocaust. The story informs the reader of the many ongoings that Wiesel has before him when he enters into this setting. The story begins on the train ride to the internment camp called Auschwitz, leading to selection days and loss of others, to the nights of walking through the cold and hearing sweet tunes slowly be put out. Within Elie Wiesel’s story, Night, the author is communicating the message to keep pushing forward and to stay strong because even Wiesel is put through terrifying dreams from others and hard nights filled with sobbing but to him, it is like no one ever would understand.
Envy is known to bring out the monster in everyone. It is an enmity that is buried deeply inside of us and causes us to do things we wouldn’t normally do.It even turns the people we love into people we hate. In the book A Separate Peace, Gene is filled with envy and it makes him act upon it blindly and injure his so called “best friend”, Finny. This envy endangers their friendship and one of their lives.
Food in Elie Wiesel’s Night is of the upmost importance. The starved Jews become animals for even the smallest crumb. For many people today, this animalistic hunger is never something commonly experienced. A cup of black coffee meant the world to them, but is now overlooked by many. However, in the beginning, Elie had the same thought of food as we do. This difference in appreciation of small things shows how belittled the Jews were.
Within playwright William Shakespeare’s fantastic work The Merchant of Venice, the character Iago cries out, “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green ey’d monster” (Enotes). Jealousy is justly called a beast, and it is a hideous creature that is illuminated in William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies, and by Woman Warrior, the memoir of Maxine Hong Kingston. Through the use of the literary elements of plots, characters, symbols, and additional plots, both pieces illustrate how, by torturing people and driving them to rash decisions, jealousy is the most destructive emotion.
In careful amounts, identity can remain unharmed, or even be found anew, using material aid. However, the attention and time one spends on increasing his/her material value can very easily crowd out other more meaningful aspects of existence. Once an unfortunate soul is perverted in such a way, what remains of the identity can be altered to better satisfy the increasing need for material wealth. The line between safety and corruption in terms of ownership of earthly riches is maintained by the discipline to receive joy from these riches, while also keeping in mind the astronomical joy and tranquility that the simple, immaterial parts of existence can already
The contemporary hero feels no constraint in talking about his terror in facing the world, of his loneliness of the paradoxical nature of his situation, of the absurdity of e...
... way of thinking is wrong and he admits that he is wrong and reconciles himself with his friends and family.