Personhood In Primo Levi's If This Is A Man

Oxford Dictionaries defines personhood as “the quality or condition of being an individual person” (Oxford Dictionaries). This denotation implies that in order to be considered a person, one must be more than a human being; one must be an individual. This then begs the question of what designates a human as an individual. The question of personhood is addressed in Italian author Primo Levi’s autobiography If This is a Man, which recounts his fight for survival in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. As demonstrated in the title, Levi’s novel poses the question to readers as to whether or not the prisoners of the Holocaust concentration camps could still be considered persons given the harsh treatment they received that deprived them of their individuality. Levi’s general description of a person in If This is a Man is an individual with the capabilities of knowledge and virtue. Based on this description, it can be concluded that the victims of the Holocaust cannot

He begins his novel with a poem entitled If This is a Man. Levi writes, “Consider if this is a man who works in the mud who does not know peace who fights for a scrap of bread who dies because of a yes or a no. Consider if this is a woman, without hair and without name with no more strength to remember, her eyes empty and her womb cold […]” (11). Levi is asking his audience to gauge whether, based on the prisoners’ treatment and living conditions in the concentration camps, these men and women can still be considered persons. The pessimistic and distressed tone of the poem is evidence that this man and woman would not fit into Levi’s definition of personhood. Additionally, these humans cannot be considered people because they have lost their individuality, as well as their ability to seek out knowledge and