Comparing The Boys In The Boat And Elie Wiesel's Night

The troubled mother who was determined to live a normal life. The wise man who dedicated his life to building boats. The young boy who played his life on the violin. And the beloved father who carried on only for the sake of his family. They were all resilient, holding onto their faith, strength, and integrity. At one time, Maya Angelou famously said, “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” Carrying on, one may overcome different obstacles and struggles. In Daniel James Brown’s novel The Boys in the Boat and Elie Wiesel’s Night, characters are resilient with holding faith and reaching their goals after facing hard setbacks. Standing by trust and kind nature, resiliency in faith

George Yeoman Pocock, a prominent boat builder in The Boys in the Boat, shows his understanding that there are things in life that are larger than himself when he is resilient after having financial trouble. Pocock had been a very tough competitor in the sport of rowing, but when his father loses his job crafting shells at Eton College, Pocock moves to America so that he is not a financial burden on his father. Even though rowing caused him to be in such a troubled state, Pocock holds faith in the sport and recognizes that he cannot control everything that happens to him in life. Pocock looks to the small things to keep his faith. “‘Sure, I can make a boat,’ he said, and then added, quoting the poet Joyce Kilmer, ‘but only God can make a tree.’ He said those separate fibers, knitted together in wood, gave cedar its ability to bounce back and resume its shape or take on a new one. The ability to yield, to bend, to give way, Pocock said, was sometimes a source of strength in men as well as in wood” (Brown 126). Pocock uses his beliefs in the power of the wood to see that he can be like the wood, too. After struggling to find his place back in rowing, Pocock realizes that he can “bend” back just as strong. While many people take small things for granted, Pocock looks to the small things to see that he does not have the power to control all. He remains humble and does

In Wiesel’s Night, Juliek, a Jewish violinist restrained in a concentration camp, holds his own boundaries with his music and his life, even though the Nazis try to take his freedoms away. “[Juliek] was playing a fragment of a Beethoven concerto. Never before had I heard such a beautiful sound. In such silence. How had he succeeded in disengaging himself? To slip out from under my body without my feeling it? The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin, and it was if Juliek’s soul had become his bow. He was playing his life. His whole being was gliding over the strings. His unfulfilled hopes. His charred past, his extinguished future. He played that which he would never play again” (Wiesel 95). While Nazi order had forbidden Jews from playing Beethoven, as it was German music, Juliek plays it anyway. He sets his own boundaries with the music he plays and does not follow the ruling of others. By putting him in the concentration camp, the Nazis take his freedoms away, and knowing that his life would soon come to an end, Juliek fulfills his life’s purpose through his one standing passion: music. Juliek would not let his life end incomplete, as many Jews in Auschwitz did, so he lives out his losses on his violin. Many other Jews in the camp spend the time before their death saying Kaddish for themselves, but Juliek’s determination leads him to use music as a supplement to the remainder of the