Do you know how many Jews died during the Holocaust? The answer is more than six million. In the novel night, Elie Wiesel describes his memories of this deadly period in history. But how did a fifteen year old boy manage to survive for eleven months in concentration camps? Elie Wiesel was able to survive due to three things: Wanting to keep his father alive, having a basic instinct to stay alive, and his cleverness.
Psychologist Albert Ellis, after years of intensive research on the human mind and its wellbeing, had this to say about the conundrum of depression: “You largely constructed your depression. It wasn’t given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.” Robert Frost begs to differ. In his poem “Acquainted with the Night”, Frost asserts that depression is much more than a mental mindset, but a physical ailment as well. A chemical imbalance, that is, that cannot be cured by strained musings of “it gets better” and “others have it worse” by concerned loved ones. While these colloquial expressions may contain a bit of truth in them, they are by no means a “cure all” for the staggering effects of mental illness. In other words, they are “neither wrong
In “Bayonet Charge”, it is easily observable that while initially the soldier appeared to be obeying orders- “Suddenly he awoke and was running”, the idea is almost immediately juxtaposed with the metaphor- “the patriotic tear that had brimmed in (the soldier’s) eye (was) Sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest”. This demonstrates clearly the depreciation of the soldier’s initial patriotism. The use of the past perfect verb “had brimmed” followed by the present continuous verb “sweating” highlights the change in his attitude towards war before and after his experiences, possibly suggesting dulled emotions and a more realistic and developed thought process. The use of the term “molten iron” suggests the weight of his burden as well as the painful experience he is now undergoing due to it. This idea is further reinforced by the rhetorical question, “In what cold clockwork of the stars and nations Was he the hand pointing that second?” This metaphor displays his uncertainty as per his crucial part in that moment in time. The soldier pictures himself as the hand on a clock, subject to the inevitable force of a clockwork motor that cannot be slowed or quickend. He realises that he does not really know why he is running and feels “statuary in mid-stride”. However, towards the end of the poem, all moral justifications for the existence of war have become meaningless- “King, honour, human dignity, etcetera Dropped like luxuries in a yelling alarm”, which is extremely dismissive of all the motives people provide for joining the army, explicitly stating that those motives do not justify and do not withstand the war. Disorientation is also highlighted in the line “Stumbling across a field of clods towards a green hedge That dazzled with rifle fire” where the confusion between the natural world and man-made world is expressed. This could be due to the fact that
In the World War II extermination camp Chelmno there were 150,000 deaths, the camp Belzec had 435,000 deaths, and the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau camp ruled with over 1,000,000 deaths. In the unbelievable novel Night by Elie Wiesel, the author gives the audience a first person look on his experiences throughout his time at several prisoner of war camps as a Jewish teenager. Through the use of motifs about the night and a person’s eyes, Wiesel writes about the deeper meaning of how he kept his dignity in the face of inhumane cruelty. By analyzing the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, one can interpret the central theme of the story into a deeper meaning from the descriptions of the night and eyes, which is important because it helps younger generations to understand clearly what Holocaust survivors endured.
“The Artilleryman’s Vision” is about a soldier who has flashbacks of tragic events from a past battle. In this poem, Whitman
The inevitable is something that can’t be escaped, no matter what the circumstances. Throughout Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death”, fate is a common topic, and associates directly with his theme. This can be viewed through his protagonist, Prince Prospero. Prince Prospero has cleverly, or so he thinks, isolated himself and one thousand others into his castle, to escape the red death. The Prince uses this isolation as a denial of reality to escape what is truly going on in the world around him. Poe creates a world around Prospero, and uses him and everything in his short story as symbols to piece by piece together a meaningful allegory. Throughout the masterful allegory “The Masque of the Red Death”, Poe tools the
In chapter one of Night by Elie Wiesel, the some of the characters of the story are introduced and the conflict begins. The main character is the author because this is an autobiographical novel. Eliezer was a Jew during Hitler’s reign in which Jews were persecuted. The book starts out with the author describing his faith. He is Jewish, but he wants to go deeper into his religion and learn more about it. He becomes good friends with a man named Moishe the Beadle. Moishe is very knowledgeable about the religion and he teaches Eliezer a lot.
During the Holocaust, the Germans deprived minority groups, especially the Jews, of human qualities, personalities, and spirits. The German Nazis treated the Jews like animals and forced them to endure abominable physical tortures. In the novel, Night, Elie Wiesel narrates his life during World War II as a Jew; he is compelled to be relocated to a concentration camp with his father, but unfortunately, he and his father are separated from his mother and sisters. Wiesel and his father face many situations where they are dehumanized along with the other fellow Jews. Through his perspective, the readers discover the cruel and disgusting practices taken against the Jews. For instance, they are compared to dogs, tattooed with numbers, and starved to the extent where they would kill one another for a piece of food.
Walt Whitman captures his audience’s attention with his realism poetry and free verse poetry throughout much of his life as a poet. Whitman was a man of the civil war era and in his poem “The Wound-Dresser” shows his life experiences in the war come full force in the way he conveys his contribution in the civil war. His view of the war as a wound-dresser and he describes some of the most horrendous scenes imaginable from the eyes of an everyday man. His poem “The Wound-Dresser” doesn’t show the war from a distance, but from right on the battlefield in its unedited version as written by Whitman. The way Whitman conveys his poems of the everyday man’s life in his time-period is presented by utilizing his realism style to connect to the audience and his gruesomely descriptive vocabulary.
In the short story “The Flowers”, Alice Walker sufficiently prepares the reader for the texts surprise ending while also displaying the gradual loss of Myop’s innocence. The author uses literary devices like imagery, setting, and diction to convey her overall theme of coming of age because of the awareness of society's behavior.
The story begins with the narrator, Death, talking about his first encounter with Liesel Meminger only 9 years old at the time in Molching, Germany. He meets Liesel traveling on a train mid-winter with her mother and brother. She sees her brother who was coughing harshly take his last breath in front of her. Liesel and her mother then exited the train as soon as it stopped and had her brother buried in that town. Present at the burial was Liesel, her mother, and two gravediggers. Liesel was the last one to part from her brother’s grave and upon walking back to her mother she notice that there was a book laying in the snow. It belonged to one of the gravediggers but she didn 't know that at the time so she took it. It was the first book that she had “stolen.”
In the poems “Disabled” by Wilfred Owen and “The Bright Lights of Sarajevo” by Tony Harrison, both poems present the truths of war. However, both differ in terms of setting and contrast that help depicts the similarities between their theme. Disabled takes place within World War I as Owen vividly describes the subject’s amputation, but the poem is centered around the subject’s adjustment to civilian life after war. In The Bright Lights of Sarajevo although Harrison discusses the consequences of partaking in war in the town, he illustrates the way in which life goes on regardless the horrific impact. Through use of setting and contrast, both poets contribute to presenting the theme of the realities of war.
The poems Untitled by Emily Dickinson and Acquainted With The Night by Robert Frost both deal with the themes of darkness and night. While on the surface they seem similar, they have very different meanings, which are made clear through devices such as diction, imagery, symbolism and irony. Robert Frost’s poem uses darkness as a metaphor for depression, while Dickinson uses the same symbol to mean ignorance.
The final ending of the world is in question to many individuals. In the short poem, “Fire and Ice”, by Robert Frost, he outlines a familiar topic, the fate of the world’s destruction. In nine lines, Frost conveys the contradiction of the two choices for the world’s end. Frost uses symbolism to convey the meaning of fire and ice as symbols for human behavior and emotion.
Within the context of recent history, Wilfred Owen is often considered the greatest writer of modern British war poetry. Composing the vast majority of his poems in a one-year time span, Owen found inspiration from his personal experiences fighting in World War I and fellow poets joining in the fight around him. Born in 1893, Owen grew up the oldest of four children, enjoying a particularly close relationship with his mother while his father remained distant. Owen graduated from Shrewsbury Technical School at age eighteen. Afterwards, Owen took numerous odd jobs throughout Europe, seemingly at a loss for his purpose in life. Owen returned to England in September 1915, a year after the Great War began, and enlisted in England’s Artists’ Rifles