Life In Elie Wiesel's Life Is Beautiful

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"Life is a matter of perspective. It can be amazing or wonderful, or it can be depressing and worthless" (Gray, n.d.). Stephen Gray fabricated this quote to convey that life is only as good or bad as one perceives it. Humans tend to have differing experiences, even if based on the same event, due to how they respond to the given situation. Looking at Elie Wiesel's (2006) book Night and the movie "Life is Beautiful" (2000), there are two divergent interpretations of how life can be perceived in the middle of arduous times. Both of these accounts encompass a father and a son relationship of which undergo a concentration camp during the Holocaust. It is how the main characters view and react to the troubling circumstances endured that impacts …show more content…

In the novel Night, the mood is comprised of despair and agony that Eliezer and his father face while in the camps. For instance, Eliezer witnessed infants being scorched and humans being put in fire (Wiesel, 2006). The involvement of such trauma took influence on the mere adolescent Eliezer. His father remained straightforward with Eliezer about what was transpiring to the most extent of his knowledge. However, in the movie "Life is Beautiful", Guido does all he can to prevent Joshua from finding out the truth of the circumstances. The tone is much lighter, it is not of sadness for Joshua for he is unaware; only the audience can experience the sadness. Joshua is protected from the atrocities of the camp because his father manufactured the situation into a game (Gray, n.d.). Since the tone was distinctly unalike in the two stories, in the same way, the experiences were also …show more content…

Eliezer and his father share a symbiotic relationship in which they support each other through the barbarities of life in the concentration camp. Eliezer feels an obligatory commitment to his father and to stay with him. This devotion that Eliezer displays is elucidated when he rebels against the alluring draw to kill himself when the opportunity arose while evacuating Birkenua (Wiesel, 2006). He wields the burdensome onus of living as an alternative to eternal peace, ceasing to exist, by rejecting to abandon his father in the hostile atmosphere of the camp. Otherwise, in "Life is Beautiful" Guido goes to substantial measures to guarantee that Joshua does not have to bear any of the tribulations of the camp. Guido deceives his son Joshua in to thinking that the concentration camp is an intricate game, which all prisoners, or players, are in competition for the reward of a real tank to the champion (Gray, n.d.). Day after day, Guido makes his exhaustion with a smile and with excitement in order to keep Joshua trusting in the lies of his father. Clearly, it is the roles that are enacted between the father and son kinship which drastically deviate how the Holocaust was