Essay Comparing Night And One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

Authors Elie Wiesel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn write about eerily similar topics in their respective works, Night and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. They both focus around the suffering and inhumanity of their situations, and use their works to raise awareness to those who had either previously been uneducated or just uninformed on the issues, and were instrumental to future conversations regarding such travesties. If one looks at the major topics/themes of these writings, they will see a clear statement about suffering, through the use of motifs such as dehumanization, the loss of hope, and food. Through the author’s description of these themes, it really gave readers a sense of the hell that they had to live through. “Let them know

They would try and not succumb to the pressures of clamoring at the unfinished meals of another person, for that would have stripped them of all of their dignity and forced them to have been at the level of some sort of animal ravaging for food. Shukrov would never let this happen, and throughout the story shows this need to save his individuality. Unfortunately though, his fellow prisoner’s arrogance paves the way for the guards to repeatedly dehumanize not only their lives but their minds as well. However, even with all that is happening, all of the inmates are able to come together and unite to protect common sources of their manners and heritage. Shukrov plays into this hard, talking about the conscious decision made to have almost all prisoners unite in removing their caps while they ate, even though the temperatures were still frigid. It was a source of commonality for all the inmates, and for those that did not abide by that custom, Shukrov told the reader that those were the prisoners most likely to lick off the bowl,

This motif was definitely seen more in Night, but was seen in the overall sense of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In One Day, the reader, by the time they are finished, is exhausted and under-stimulated by the story. That’s because it is meant to do that to a reader. It makes sure it captures every single detail of the day, especially the ones that are normally kept out of a story because they pose no incentive to the reader. This is for the purpose of letting the reader try and grasp around the fact that this day is just one in TEN YEARS. Ten years is a long time, and for the readers, they cannot fathom doing this for ten years, every day. The reason this stands for the loss of hope is because it showed the sheer amount of mental suffering that occurred to these prisoners, and would often cause them to lose it and lose themselves. Night takes this on in a much more direct approach. The first of this is the use of Wiesel’s faith throughout the story. Wiesel believes wholeheartedly in an all knowing, all seeing, all loving God. When asked about why he would pray, he would answer by asking those people why they breathed. He even claims that he could not believe in a world in which a God doesn’t exist. However that all changes. Wiesel, at the beginning, was very ignorant and refused to realize the severity of the situation at hand. This just only allows for a heart crushing blow when he does