Theme Of Suffering In Night And Life Is Beautiful

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception,”(Huxley, n.d.). This quote by Aldous Huxley refers to the idea of perception changing the way an individual sees the world and absolute truth. Pain and suffering is imminent, but the way people respond and look at the pain is what really makes them as a person. This quote can directly be applied to the comparison between Elie Wiesel’s (2006) novel Night and the film “Life is Beautiful”(2000). These two stories tell the experiences of two young boys who were forced to face the horrors of the holocaust. Both boys lost everything in the tragedy of the mass genocide of the time but they chose to look at the situation in different ways, changing the overall experience for each. In the novel Night and the movie “Life is Beautiful”, the holocaust is portrayed both similarly and differently through

Both stories follow the story of boys who experienced the holocaust first-hand and lived to tell the tale. This being said, the differences make the stories almost polar opposites when one puts them together to be juxtaposed. In Night, Elie loses all faith and hope, leaving the reader with a sense of despair for Elie and the rest of his family. He escapes but there is no sense of victory or hope given to the reader because there was none of that for Elie himself. In “Life is Beautiful”, the viewers feel a sense of relief when Joshua gets out of the camp alive and is reunited with his mother, making it very evident that his faith is still completely in tact. Thought these stories are somewhat similar, their differences greatly outweigh them, causing the feelings of the viewer to be completely different. The development of the character’s perspective, the provisions received from God, and the theme of family ties beating the despair in times of trouble are all but a few of the differences that separate these two