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Literary analysis slave narratives
Literary analysis slave narratives
Literary analysis slave narratives
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Literary analysis slave narratives
Literary analysis slave narratives
Literary analysis slave narratives
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
From the small town of Sighet in Transylvania to the huge concentration camps of Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, the author and victim of the book Night, the horrifying experience of the Holocaust. Wiesel is a 15 year old Jewish boy who was captured by the Germans or “Nazis” during WWII. He went through an overwhelming amount of trauma, like when he got separated from his mother and sisters and watching his father suffer an unbearable amount of pain that eventually killed him. The fact is, power is a tool that can corrupt itself and others, it can ruin people’s lives and it can do that without people even realizing it.
In Livia Bitton-Jackson’s memoir I Have Lived a Thousand Years, Bitton-Jackson recounts her experience of surviving the Holocaust through the character of Elli Friedman. Elli is a blossoming, intelligent adolescent girl who lives a normal life until the events of the Holocaust take place. Even a broken relationship with her mother does not stop Elli from giving up. This illuminates aspects of Elli’s admirable personality, such as wisdom beyond her years and her strong ambitious attitude. Elli’s young spirit still fights keep her mother alive in the camps despite her mother’s animosity.
However, this quote speaks directly to the idea of natal alienation in society. Natal alienation goes directly to the heart of the problem with the misunderstandings in the play. There is a sense of loss of ties between the both the ascending and descending generations in the play. This type of alienation from formal history, blood, and religion created a detachment from the culture and belief systems of the past. Therefore, the slave was used as the ultimate human “tool” such as to be as disposable as a wrench when no longer needed.
In Elie Wiesel’s novel Night, he displayes a theme of desperation and confusion. It tells the story of the Jewish race from the point of view of a teenage boy. Their family then gets split, so the sister and the mother go to one concentration camp and the brother and the dad go to another. When they arrive to the camp, they get split into different sleeping quarters. Throughout the rest of their journey, they experience hardship and torture as in having to be “Pressed tightly against one another, in effort to resist the cold,” (Wiesel 98).
In Night, the setting shows some symbolism and that helps the reader understand what is going to happen next in the story. Wiesel writes how about in the first few pages in the first chapter how they are not afraid of the barbed wire, but in reality the Jewish people should be scared, because barbed wire usually means danger, but instead they had no fear. By Describing how they fearless they were about the barbed wire, Wiesel wrote, “The barbed wire that encircles us like a wall did not fill us with fear”(11). The barbed wire symbolises how dangerous the barbed wire was that surrounded them and how the Jewish people should be concerned, but instead they had no fear, because they got to live with other Jewish people. Wiesel is explaining
The book I am reading is Not for sale by David Batstone; a journalist who seemed highly fascinated with human trafficking and slavery. David is co founder and president of Not for sale, furthermore he was a civil rights activist with the plan to inform others how to avoid the global slave trade. One major reason for the writing of this book was due to the fact he was an anti-slavery activist wanting to explain how to be aware of human trafficking. David wanted to write the book knowing abolitionist and others are struggling to end this appalling epidemic which he thought would be strenuous. Batstone believed all people should be free to live which he looked upon as a major reason for the book as a remedy; for the lacerate ones who’ve lost it all David batstone is identical
“‘I have terrible news,’ he said at last. ‘Deportation.’ The ghetto was to be completely wiped out. We were to leave street by street the following day” (Wiesel 11). Throughout the vast novel, Night,by Elie Wiesel, the protagonist Elie had gone through agonizing experiences, for the duration of the gruesome and unspeakable genocide.
A single needle attached to a pen holder took away someone’s identity. A pair of disheveled, ill-fitting rags stripped someone of their individuality. Depriving someone of basic necessities took away their soul. Upon arrival at the camps Elie and his father were separated from his female family members, never to see them again. Immediately, Elie along with the other prisoners were subjected to camp life.
The human condition is a very malleable idea that is constantly changing due to the current state of mankind. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the concept of the human condition is displayed in the worst sense of the concept, during the Holocaust of WWII. During this time, multiple groups of people, most notably European Jews, were persecuted against and sent to horrible hard labor and killing centers such as Auschwitz. In this memoir, Wiesel uses complex figurative language such as similes and metaphors to display the theme that a person’s state as a human, both at a physical and emotional level, can be altered to extreme lengths, and even taken away from them, under the most extreme conditions.
In Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs narrative they show how the institution of slavery dehumanizes an individual both physically and emotionally. In Jacobs narrative she talks about how women had it worse than men did in slavery. While men suffered, women had it worse due to sexual abuse. The emotional, physical, and sexual abuse was dehumanizing for anyone.
“Yes, sir, he gives me enough, such as it is.” The colonel, after ascertaining where the slave belonged, rode on; the man also went on about his business, not dreaming that he had been conversing with his master. He thought, said, and heard nothing more of the matter, until two or three weeks afterwards. The poor man was then informed by his overseer that, for having found fault with his master, he was now to be sold to a Georgia trader. He was immediately chained and handcuffed; and thus, without a moment’s warning, he was snatched away, and forever sundered, from his family and friends, by a hand more unrelenting than death.”
Eli Wiesel, the author of Night, demonstrates dehumanization by illustrating how the Nazis tortured the Jews. The foreign Jews of Sighet were being deported out of their homes. Moshe the Beatle tells Elie of his time in Galicia with great emotion. Elie shares what the Nazis did to the Jews, “Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for machine guns” (Wiesel 6).
During the time of 1933-1945 the Nazi’s implemented a series of dehumanizing actions towards the jewish. In the book “Night” by Eliezer Wiesel, Wiesel discusses his life before being deported to a concentration camp, his experience in concentrations camps, and how he was finally liberated. Through Wiesel, we are able to witness the way these unfortunate jewish people were stripped of their rights, experimented on and objectified. First of all, there were many laws that were being established that were specifically targeting the Jewish population as time was progressing in Nazi Germany. These laws made a huge impact and made it more difficult for the jewish community to live as “normal” human beings.
In Night one of the ways that the Jews were dehumanized was by abuse. There were beatings, “I never felt anything except the lashes of the whip... Only the first really hurt.” (Wiesel, 57) “They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs.
Captivity is defined as the state of being imprisoned or confined. A tragic experience is given a whole new perspective from Louise Erdrich 's poem, “Captivity”. Through descriptive imagery and a melancholic tone, we can see the poem and theme develop in her words. Erdrich takes a quote from Mary Rowlandson’s narrative about her imprisonment by the Native Americans and her response to this brings readers a different story based off of the epigraph. Louise Erdrich compiles various literary devices to convey her theme of sympathy, and her poem “Captivity” through specific and descriptive language brings a whole new meaning to Mary Rowlandson’s narrative.