Nightjohn is a book by Gary Paulsen about a southern slave’s struggle to learn to read. After reading Nightjohn and several slave interviews, it is clear that Paulsen did research before writing the book as it shares similarities with many first-person accounts of the pre-war south. For example, Walter Calloway (a former slave) claimed to have saw a 13 year old slave girl whipped “so hard she nearly die” which also happened in Nightjohn. There are other examples too, like how slaves were often sold between plantations. Sarny’s mother was sold when she was four years old, and Walter’s “mammy wid [him] an’ [his] older brudder was sold” when he young also. Yet another would be how they sent dogs after the slaves when they ran away (“brought
The Book Night was the autobiography of Eliezer Wiesel. This was a horrible and sobering tale of his life story. The story takes place in Sighet, Translyvania. It's the year 1941 and World War II is occurring. Eliezer was 12 at this time and wasn't really aware of what was occurring in the world concerning the Jewish people. He had a friend who went by the name Moshe the Beadle. Moshe was very good friend of Elezers'.
The book, Night, by Eliezer (Elie) Wiesel, entails the story of his childhood in Nazi concentration camps all around Europe. Around the middle of the 20th century in the early 1940s, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi army traveled around Europe in an effort to exterminate the Jewish population. As they went to through different countries in order to enforce this policy, Nazi officers sent every Jewish person they found to a concentration camp. Often called death camps, the main purpose was to dispose of people through intense work hours and terrible living conditions. Wiesel writes about his journey from a normal, happy life to a horrifying environment surrounded by death in the Nazi concentration camps. Night is an amazingly
For example, Douglass recalls watching Aunt Hester being whipped by the slaveholder: I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I remember well.
“‘I’ll be back,’ he said. ‘Got some things to do and I’ll be back.’ But I knew he was lying… just saying the good things to hear. He ain’t coming back, I thought, and I watched him leave.” (page 81). Even though Sarny thought that NightJohn would be leaving for good, he was instead only leaving for a little while to set up the pit school for the slave children. Yet again, while trying to do something like this he was yet again putting himself in the danger of being caught and punished or sold. On page 85 NightJohn comes back to get Sarny in the middle of the night. He then surprises her and brings her to the pit school. By putting Sarny and the other children's needs before his own NightJohn was able to make the slave children’s lives better.
Women involved in slavery had several struggles dealing with physical and mental abuse. In one of Douglass's narratives it states "an old aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back til she was literally covered with blood". The women would be beaten brutally, and treated as if they were not human beings. They also had no chance of fighting back against the abuse, which is shown from this quote. While in the quote from Jacob's narrative states "She sits on the cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn
Night is a memoir written by Elie Wiesel, a young Jewish boy, who tells of his experiences during the Holocaust. Elie is a deeply religious boy whose favorite activities are studying the Talmud and spending time at the Temple with his spiritual mentor, Moshe the Beadle. At an early age, Elie has a naive, yet strong faith in God. But this faith is tested when the Nazi's moves him from his small town.
Frederick Douglass, in his autobiography, singles out the atrocities of the “Peculiar Institution”, from foul to barbarous. In The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave, former slave turned abolitionist, Frederick Douglass (1845) states that many masters treated their slaves cruelly. Douglass (1845) tells of many instances of this inimical treatment. One horror is that many slave women were raped by their white master and then bore them children (p. 2-3) . Douglass' mother might have experienced this (p.2-3). Another was the inhumane ways that slaves were punished, ways such as whipping, having them killed, horribly beaten and many others (p.14-15). Author Fergus M. Bordewich in his book Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America, tells of more atrocious forms of punishment. One form that Bordewich (2005) describes is horrifically amputating a slave's ear or limb, and then the masters would either hanging the slave or putting the slave into a cage to die (p.25). Another Bordew...
The sexual abuse and exploitation of slaves and degradation of the slave family in antebellum America was not uncommon. Slave owners had a totalitarian authority over their slaves and subsequently over their children.
Many of life’s fantasies can resemble someone from our past or someone we care about. Every so often, a reader may come across a story that feels as if the narrator is telling the story through his or her own life experiences. The nonfictional story “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” is a convincing third person limited omniscient narration by Harriet Jacobs, and it shows a diverse use of extreme cruelty and hardship slaves resisted in their condition and created their own ways of living, which allow the readers to learn how narrators can use their emotions and feeling to explain their life experiences. The story’s main purpose was to show how slaves created their own culture and ways of life through the bible and their religion, Jacobs
In Eliezer Wiesel’s novel “Night”, it depicts the life of a father and son going through the concentration camp of World War II. Both Eliezer and his father are taken from their home, where they would experience inhuman and harsh conditions in the camps. The harsh conditions cause Eliezer and his father’s relationship to change. During their time in the camps, Eliezer Wiesel and his father experience a reversal of their roles.
Nightjohn is set in the South of the United States before the Civil War. The main characters in the book are John “Nightjohn”, Sarny, Mammy, and the plantation owner Waller. John was bought by Waller for $1000 dollars and was subject to cruel treatment from the start, having to pull Waller’s horse cart naked and barefoot. The book shows how being literate contributed to the escape of some slaves before the Civil War, and how slavery played a pivotal role in society back then. In 1860, there were almost 4 million slaves owned across the country, which was the majority of the black population. John meets Sarny after offering to teach her reading and writing in exchange for tobacco.
Night is a dramatic book that tells the horror and evil of the concentration camps that many were imprisoned in during World War II. Throughout the book the author Elie Wiesel, as well as many prisoners, lost their faith in God. There are many examples in the beginning of Night where people are trying to keep and strengthen their faith but there are many more examples of people rebelling against God and forgetting their religion.
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.
Night is an autobiography by a man named Eliezer Wiesel. The autobiography is a quite disturbing record of Elie’s childhood in the Nazi death camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald during world war two. While Night is Elie Wiesel’s testimony about his experiences in the Holocaust, Wiesel is not, precisely speaking, the story’s protagonist. Night is narrated by a boy named Eliezer who represents Elie, but details set apart the character Eliezer from the real life Elie. For instance, Eliezer wounds his foot in the concentration camps, while Elie actually wounded his knee. Wiesel fictionalizes seemingly unimportant details because he wants to distinguish his narrator from himself. It is almost impossibly painful for a survivor to write about his Holocaust experience, and the mechanism of a narrator allows Wiesel to distance himself somewhat from the experience, to look in from the outside.
Douglass also gives accounts of the horrific treatment of slaves by the plantation owner. "He (Master) would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at dawn by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood."(14) He mentions the tangible blood and shrieks to emphasize the pain and torture of a human being. This slave bleeds like any other person and so it is easier for a reader ...