Inherit The Wind And Night Analysis

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Imagine just one person being able to change the fate of the world, forever. This image is not at all far fetched, indeed it has occurred many times throughout world history. One man 's opinion, partnered with determination and a burning passion, is enough to accomplish this. Both the play, Inherit the Wind, and Night, by Elie Wiesel, demonstrate what can happen when one man has an opposing view to the normality of society. Inherit the Wind, a play written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee, is a reflection of the Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a science teacher explained the theory of evolution in a highly religious, small town. While the memoir, Night, describes the events of the Holocaust and the influence of Adolf Hitler on the Jewish …show more content…

Both Night, by Elie Wiesel, and Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, demonstrate the powerful impact one individual can have on a large society, while exploiting the response of the society to new …show more content…

In both Inherit the Wind and Night, the reader can easily see these issues. In Inherit the Wind, Bertram Cates, the individual, is trying to teach a town about evolution and Charles Darwin. In Night, the individual, Hitler, imposes his will on society, forcing the Jewish community into concentration camps or to death. While in both instances the “individual” has an opposing view towards society, one can clearly see the differences between them. Before receiving his sentence, Cates makes the following statement, “I feel I am . . . I have been convicted of violating an unjust law. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can.” In this statement alone, Cates is standing up for what he believes in, despite the disapproval of his own town. Rather than committing a genocide on a particular religion, Cates protests his beliefs peacefully in a courtroom and a classroom. These two portrayals of the individual contradict each other completely, showing that neither the individual nor the society is greater than the other. “Every successful individual knows that his or her achievement depends on a community of persons working together.” This quote, while neither in the play nor memoir, depicts how both the society and the individual must work together to complete a task. Without this harmony between the two, events