The book I read was called, Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl was psychiatrist and philospher who lived through the nazi era, one of the most dehumanizing periods of history, came face to face with conditions that most people couldn’t deal with psychologically. He made the conclusion that the sort of person the prisoner becomes is the result of an inner decision and not the result of outside influences alone. Through observation (in concentration camps, and as a therapist), extensive research, and establishing a doctrine of principles that show the challenges of being human, Frankl developed the idea of logotherapy. Logotherapy is therapy through meaning, derived from the Greek word, logos. The most intriging thought in the book and shows how he faced the challenges may best be summed up in the phrase—“He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how’.”
The book is divided basically into two sections. The first deals with his experiences in the life of a concentration camp, and the second deals with a description of what logotherapy is and principles of which it is founded on.
In the beginning of the book he decribes that his intention of writing the book are not that of to prove factual accounts, for there are many of those already, but to explain their experiences in present day knowledge. He goes on to say ,”No explanations are needed for those who have been inside, and others will understand neither how we felt then of how we feel now.
“There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose.” An Abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior (book). There were a few phases that the prisoner went into as he entered prison life. The first is what Frankl called “delusional reprieve”. He describes this as the condemened man, immidiately before he gets executed has the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. As many people were ushered into camps in the beginning, many people hung on to these shreds of hope and believed that these camps wouldn’t be so bad. In this phase people were just beginning to see how bad things were. Frankl tell of how he read somewhere that man cannot live without a stated number of hours—“Quite wrong!”, He says.
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.
Viktor Frankl, the author of the novel Man’s Search For Meaning, a holocaust survivor and also known for his theory of locotherapy, explains the hardships that the holocaust brings while living in a concentration camp. Throughout his experience, he confesses that it is hard to have hope and faith in order to live. He gave strongly worded advice to other inmates and was also a doctor to the victims. He is seen as a powerful, bold, and courageous character towards everyone he meets. His stories and incidents that occur throughout the novel portray locotherapy, which is described as the search for meaning in life. By setting goals and looking toward the future can help to push through hardships such as the holocaust.
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 challenges 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. At a conference in 1986 Elie explains “The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference”. (Elie Wiesel), meaning that opposite of love is not hate, it’s getting used to use to the situation, to the point that the person doesn’t care whether what is happening is right or wrong. In the novel Elie experience physical, mental, and spiritual pain, that test his humanity and morality.
Voltaire, a famous French Enlightenment philosopher, once said, “Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.” Essentially, Voltaire is saying that everything seems to be fine, but in reality it is not and never will be. Voltaire’s ideas are reflected in Elie Wiesel’s Night. In his memoir, Wiesel, his father, and a community of Jews believe that the Germans will never reach their small Transylvanian village of Sighet. However, on the third day, the Germans arrive and begin deporting Jews to an unknown location. During this period, the Jews believe that they are being sent away for their own good, but later realize it was all just an illusion. The Jews were placed into cattle wagons and were sent off on a long and horrific ride. Their final destination was Auschwitz-Birkenau. The remainder of the memoir focuses on Wiesel and his father’s struggle for survival. Wiesel’s chronicle can be read as an extended example of the effects of optimism.
As humans, we require basic necessities, such as food, water, and shelter to survive. But we also need a reason to live. The reason could be the thought of a person, achieving some goal, or a connection with a higher being. Humans need something that drives them to stay alive. This becomes more evident when people are placed in horrific situations. In Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, he reminisces about his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust. There the men witness horrific scenes of violence and death. As time goes on they begin to lose hope in the very things that keep them alive: their faith in God, each other, and above all, themselves.
It is no mystery that the lives of the prisoners of Nazi concentration camps were an ultimate struggle. Hitler’s main goal was to create a racial state, one consisting purely of the ‘superior’ Aryan race. The Germans under Hitler’s control successfully eradicated a vast number of the Jewish population, by outright killing them, and by dehumanizing them. Auschwitz is the home of death of the mind, body, and soul, and the epitome of struggle, where only the strong survive.
On the first night in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Wiesel feels his life beginning to change forever, saying “never shall i forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed” (34). Although he has only been in the camp one day, he feels broken and hopeless. Everything in his life has changed and he will never be the same again. Additionally, his perception of time becomes very skewed due to the hard labor and anguish he endures. He cannot remember how long he had been away from home, saying “so many events had taken place in just a few hours that I had completely lost all notion of time. When had we left our homes? And the ghetto? And the train? Only a week? One single night?” (37). Because of the trauma that he had experienced in such a short period of time, Wiesel could not tell how long he had been at the camp. This skewed perception of time adds to the dreariness and anguish Wiesel feels throughout the
”Lie down on it! On your belly! I obeyed. I no longer felt anything except the lashes of the whip. One! Two! He took time between the lashes. Ten eleven! Twenty-three. Twenty four, twenty five! It was over. I had not realized it, but I fainted” (Wiesel 58). It was hard to imagine that a human being just like Elie Wiesel would be treating others so cruelly. There are many acts that Elie has been through with his father and his fellow inmates. Experiencing inhumanity can affect others in a variety of ways. When faced with extreme inhumanity, The people responded by becoming incredulous, losing their faith, and becoming inhumane themselves.
The author of Escape from Camp 14 and the Allegory of the Cave are trying to show how isolation and manipulation of the individual’s environment can affect their mental and physical state. Imprisonment can cause an individual to perceive and respond differently from the norm when trying to survive and to learn how to succeed in their environment. Their confinement and fear of the unknown have caused them to become afraid and given control to their manipulator. Unfortunately,these individuals have been in their control environments since birth so are not able to see or have knowledge of anything else besides what they are taught. For instance, in Camp 14 the government has placed rules to control the prisoners within its walls by implementing
One inmate suffered from a physical and emotional breakdown. The conditions became so severe that he was released. Zimbardo later stated that, “we did so reluctantly because we believed that he was trying to ‘con’ us.” Clearly Zimbardo was overreacting and should have seen that his actions and choice of experimentation caused the man to spiral out of control. By day 4, a rumor was going around that they newly sprung inmate was planning another revolt. As a result, they moved the entire experiment to another floor of the psychology building, and yet again another inmate suffered a breakdown. Soon after, he was released, and over the next two days, two more inmates would do the likewise. A final example of the effects of this experiment is shown when a fifth inmate is released. This time, the man developed a psychosomatic rash over is entire body. These are usually caused or aggravated by a mental factor such as internal conflict or stress, similar to all of the conditions faced inside the mock prison. After the fifth grueling day, Zimbardo finally thought his experiment was a success. The events inside the prison walls were occurring just as Zimbardo had planned. He was finding success and joy in these grown men’s emotional breakdown, and many thought this experiment could be considered ethically
By means of comic illustration and parody, Art Spiegelman wrote a graphic novel about the lives of his parents, Vladek and Anja, before and during the Holocaust. Spiegelman’s Maus Volumes I and II delves into the emotional struggle he faced as a result of his father’s failure to recover from the trauma he suffered during the Holocaust. In the novel, Vladek’s inability to cope with the horrors he faced while imprisoned, along with his wife’s tragic death, causes him to become emotionally detached from his son, Art. Consequently, Vladek hinders Art’s emotional growth. However, Art overcomes the emotional trauma his father instilled in him through his writing.
Guilt is an extremely powerful emotion that can consume one from the inside out. In the novel Night, written by Elie Wiesel, everybody, including the Jews act out against each other and do not stand up for one another. In this story, Jews are forced from their homes and brought to concentration camps with rough conditions. Elie’s persecution occurred in the following concentration camps: Auschwitz, Buna, Gleiwitz, and Buchenwald. The Jews took on an overwhelming amount of hardships, but the most difficult obstacle to conquer was man's lack of humanity to man. Throughout the book, the inhumanity against man develops from widespread prejudice to terribly personal punishments.
“What do you expect? That’s war…” Elie Wiesel, young teenage boy sent to work in a concentration camp with his family near the end of WW2. Author of his own autobiography, Night recounting his struggles during that time. This book is about a boy named Elie Wiesel who was captured by the Nazi’s and was put into a concentration camp, and got disconnected from God, and was very close to his mom, dad, and family. Throughout Night Elie Wiesel addresses the topic of genocide through the use of imagery, simile, and personification.
...s fit. This is why everything in the book must not be viewed as being true. The narrator can admit to being constrained when it comes to knowing everything and the reason for this is that he will always be constrained by his view about things that he does know and his imagination of reality which he cannot possibly no. It is for this reason he cannot be viewed as being completely trustworthy or reliable but through the use of his evidence chapters and external links, we can consider that he is at least somewhat trustworthy and reliable which helps make the hypothesis’s more plausible.
Primo Levi, a survivor, gives account on his incarceration in the Monowitz- Buna concentration camp. Setting out with his arrest by the fascist militia in December of 1943, the text conforms to Primo Levi’s experience in the succeeding twelve months as an inmate in the National Socialists’ Monowitz- Buna concentration camp, seven kilometers east of Auschwitz. Upon arriving in the camp, the first-person narrator, Primo Levi, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, embarks a world that renders him astonished; simply by making literary notes to Dante’s Inferno can he manage to draw its contours. After the degrading intake procedures, he actualizes that the objective of the place to which they have been brought is the psychological and physical devastation of the inmates. The inmat...