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'Death Of Schillinger' By Tadeusz Borowski Irony

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In 'Death of Schillinger, ' Tadeusz Borowski uses factual writing, characterization, and dramatic irony to engage readers in questioning the conflicting versions of ethics and perspectives during the Holocaust. In using 'ethics,' I mean "a system or set of moral principles" (OED). By using 'perspectives,' I mean to "regard or interpret something as being either much less or much more significant than it actually is" (OED). Throughout the Holocaust, there have been differing views between the prisoners of concentration camps and the Nazi soldiers. In Death of Schillinger, Borowski goes into this differing view by providing two perspectives of a situation from the soldiers' and the prisoner's perspectives. Borowski used many literary techniques in The Death of Schillinger, but an obvious one was his use of story …show more content…

As a Nazi soldier, Schillinger believed he was behaving correctly. His perspective is an example of irony because his mentality differs significantly from reality. Specifically, the foreman who is telling the story of Schillinger comments, "That man didn't understand even to the very end.". The foreman addresses the irony because he acknowledges Schillinger's false view and emphasizes how different his perspective is from reality, which is a prime example of dramatic irony. Accordingly, Schillinger's perspective can be a symbol of Nazi soldiers during the Holocaust; similar to Schillinger, Nazi soldiers believed they were behaving correctly and that they were on the right side of history. The foreman is a symbol of individuals who look back on the Holocaust because similar to the foreman, they can see how flawed the Nazi's view of reality was and the irony of how they believed they were doing the right thing. The author used dramatic irony to enhance the audience's understanding of the story as well as the Holocaust in

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