Compare and Contrast: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and The Tenth Man

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Just because two objects are similar doesn’t mean they are the same. This is a concept that is applied to various areas of knowledge such as mathematics, chemistry, physics and especially biology. In biology, when comparing two organisms you have to consider the amount of similarities and differences between both organisms to determine whether they correspond to the same category or in completely different ones. This idea is also applied when comparing literary works in which you have to determine if the amount of differences between them set both literary works distantly from each other. Yet, there could be some similarities between both stories that accomplish to maintain a strong relationship between them. This is the case of the novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and the short story “The Tenth Man”. Even though these texts are two literary works that focus on the Nazi Holocaust which took place at World War II, both stories tell the occurrence of the same event through opposite points of view which results in a clear distinction between them.

Although The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and “The Tenth Man” are essentially two different literary works, both stories are developed through the same historical context. In Fink’s short story “The Tenth Man”, certain emphasis is given to the Nazi Holocaust which was an event that took place during World War II. Moreover, it was an event that victimized specifically Jewish individuals. This is first demonstrated in the short story “The Tenth Man” when Chaim, a Jewish Carpenter, appeared in the lower part of the town where he once lived:

They watched him from above, from the cliff above the river, watched him plod along until, nearing the first houses of the lower town, he sto...

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...rrence of the Nazi Holocaust through two different points of view. This is because the point of view illustrated by the novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas presents what happened to the Jewish individuals while they resided on the concentration camps whereas the short story “The Tenth Man” illustrated the kinds of effects the Nazi Holocaust had on the individuals that managed to survive it. So in a certain the sense, both The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and “The Tenth Man” are opposite sides of the same coin. They may be different however, they can be joined together to form a whole and achieve a better understanding of what happened during the Nazi Holocaust.

Works Cited

Boyne, John. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Great Britain: David Fickling Books, 2006. Print.

Fink, Ida. “The Tenth Man.” Trans. Madeline Levine and Francine Prose. 2014. Microsoft Word File.

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