While first-hand accounts of terrible times are necessary in order to understand the horrors of the experience, it is often hard to get those who experienced it to come forward and give their story. This problem holds especially true for Holocaust survivors and their testimony. When the survivors do come forward it can be even more difficult to ensure that the account is both accurate and effective in telling the story. Luckily, there are those like Charlotte Delbo whose Holocaust account Auschwitz and After is able to use unique story telling strategies in order to create a compelling and clear testimony. Despite Theodor Adorno’s claim “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Charlotte Delbo’s usage of poetry and prose as a vehicle …show more content…
She is able to do this by presenting parts of her testimony as poems while also switching up the point of view that the story is being told in. In addition, Delbo often breaks down the fourth wall and speaks directly to the reader, a technique that is very effective in evoking an emotional response. Delbo’s poetic approach and varying sentence structure allows her to create the “aesthetics of agitation” which makes some of the story easier to understand and digest by using style and structure to convey important but also disturbing details (XVI). When the events of her account become chaotic she uses short sentence fragments to convey the feeling of confusion. Whenever she was describing role-call she would use long and descriptive sentences to make it seem as though the process is going on for a long time like during the roll call in which her friend allows her to cry (105). The varying sentence length helps to enhance Delbo’s testimony and make her experiences that much more …show more content…
The final technique she uses includes involving her own guilt in the stories. She will be in the middle of a disturbing narrative when she comes out of the text to say “And now I am sitting in a café, writing this text,” (29). By removing herself from the story, it makes the readers feel like she is speaking directly to them, which leads to a deeper emotional connection to the story. She also references this connection to the reader again when she claims “It was strange to be the only one to have changed,” (318). By using language that references her emotions after the ordeal Delbo establishes a deeper connection with the reader, and is able to find a unique way to connect to the reader. Charlotte Delbo’s account includes first hand story telling, but mixed in is additional poetry that is often not found in Holocaust writing. By using poetry and varying sentence structure, Delbo’s atypical account is able to create a testimony that . Her story is still very effective and tells the reader explicitly what happened in the camps and why that memory of the terrible time can never be
When in America, Helen found that it was hard not to talk about past and the stories of her imprisonment. “Some survivors found it impossible to talk about their pasts. By staying silent, they hoped to bury the horrible nightmares of the last few years. They wanted to spare their children and those who knew little about the holocaust from listening to their terrible stories.” In the efforts to save people from having to hear about the gruesome past, the survivors also lacked the resources to mentally recovery from the tragedy.
This gives the author opportunity to use his writing to give personal insight to the situation. Moody gives a first person narrative of a person’s mind when going through a highly unexpected change in their life through the narrator. The story starts sporadically going from present day Halloween to past memories of the narrator with his sister. Moody adds sentences fragments such as “Jokes with the fillip of sentimentality. Anyway, in this picture her blond hair...” (294). The fragments that constantly appears gives the narrator a complex mindset, and the narrator gets off topic throughout the story. After a recent death or just any major change in life, the thoughts of the mind are running trying to make sense of the situation. His mind creates confusion in the story, but this is what the author wants to portray through the
2. The author creates tone, which changes from peaceful and calm to horror. Words in the story like humorlessly and awkwardly help the reader feel the tension in the town. In the story, “She held her breath while her husband went forward” proved that the characters was dealing with ...
Delia is a hard working woman who uses her faith in God to guide and protect her from her husband’s physical and emotional abuse. She, as a protagonist, is physically weak but yet spiritually strong. Sykes, in the story, tormented Delia in many ways throughout the story. One incident was with the bull horn when he tried to scare Delia while she was sorting the white clothes. Sykes also kicks all the clothes she had sorted all over the floor. Through all the pain and torment she goes through with Sykes, she still goes to church on Sundays and pray and come home go back to working around the house.
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed…“(Wiesel 32) Livia-Bitton Jackson wrote a novel based on her personal experience, I Have Lived a Thousand Years. Elli was a Holocaust victim and her only companion was her mother. Together they fought for hunger, mistreatment and more. By examining the themes carefully, the audience could comprehend how the author had a purpose when she wrote this novel. In addition, by seeing each theme, the audience could see what the author was attacking, and why. By illustrating a sense of the plight of millions of Holocaust victims, Livia-Bitton Jackson explores the powerful themes of one’s will to survive, faith, and racism.
The books Maus I and Maus II, written by Art Spiegelman over a thirteen-year period from 1978-1991, are books that on the surface are written about the Holocaust. The books specifically relate to the author’s father’s experiences pre and post-war as well as his experiences in Auschwitz. The book also explores the author’s very complex relationship between himself and his father, and how the Holocaust further complicates this relationship. On a deeper level the book also dances around the idea of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. The two books are presented in a very interesting way; they are shown in comic form, which provides the ability for Spiegelman to incorporate numerous ideas and complexities to his work.
In contrast, syntax provides a new perspective to the narrator s behavior as sentence structure draws attention to her erratic behavior. By her last entry, the narrator s sentences have become short and simple. Paragraphs 227 through 238 contain few adjectives resulting in limited descriptions yet her short sentences emphasize her actions providing plenty of imagery. The syntax quickly pulls the reader through the end as the narrator reaches an end to her madness.
The disturbing description of the serial killer is recited without any waver whatsoever away from the intent only to divulge information. The narrator makes no personal comment and expresses no opinion about Howard. After the narrator has given the information to the listener, the narrator leads the train of thought right back to the work environment. The idea of a horrible mass murderer is interrupted by his typing ability. This continued contrast now goes past unstable and borders on psychotic.
Writers often use literature as a means of communicating traumatic events that occur in history, and such events are recorded by first-hand accounts as well as remembered by people far removed from the situation. Two traumatic events in history that are readily found in literature are The Irish Potato Famine and The Holocaust. A literary medium that has been used quite poignantly to convey trauma is poetry and the poetry from these two historical traumatic events is not difficult to find. Some wrote poetry to maintain their sanity as they experienced the traumatic event while others wrote after-the-fact as an outlet for emotional pain. Some wrote in remembrance of what they had lived through and so that others in succeeding generations could fathom even a glimpse of their traumatic experience. Another group of writers, far removed from the events, felt they had some light to shed on the subject. These people may be from a background similar to the victims or very learned on the matter surrounding it. A reader may wonder why poetry is such a viable option for conveying the trauma of so many people. Hilda Schiff writes, “the contemporaneous literature of any period of history is not only an integral part of that period, but it also allows us to understand historical events and experiences better than the bare facts alone can do because they enable us to absorb them inwardly” (xiv). The facts are raw and bare, like a skeleton. The literature and poetry add the skin and features to the bones to make the people and images they represent more realistic.
The events experienced in Auschwitz by Wiesel would influence him to write about this moment. Though Wiesel had difficulty expressing the trial that he experienced, he discovered that formatting the event into ...
Schwartz, Leslie. Surviving the hell of Auschwitz and Dachau: a teenage struggle toward freedom from hatred.. S.l.: Lit Verlag, 2013. Print.
Literary critic and the novel’s annotator Alfred Appel Jr. claims “what is extraordinary about Lolita is the way in which Nabokov enlists us, against our will, on Humbert’s side… Humbert has figuratively made the reader his accomplice in both statutory rape and murder” (Durantaye, Style Is Matter: the Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov 8). Nabokov employs various literary devices such as direct second reader address, metaphor, and allusions through Humbert Humbert as a means to conjure up feelings of empathy. The reader comes to find that . It is clear that Humbert Humbert uses second person address as a way to control how the reader perceives him. Through the use of this narrative mode, he aims to convince the reader that his sexual violence is artistically justifiable and that the art he creates is a remedy for mortality. I will argue is that art is not a remedy for mortality because in Humbert Humbert’s creation of Lolita, t...
...e she was curious about things that she was supposed to keep out of her mind, such as sex. Yet, Del learned in the end. Del learned many things such as religion, love, sex and hardships of life where you just have to accept when the ones you love die. Alice Munroe explains the life of Del as she grows from a child, to an adolescent teenager to a fully grown woman heading into University, writing a novel about a Sheriff and his family. The main idea portrayed in this book is that being curious isn’t a bad thing. Everyone is born with curiosity, everyone has a right to be curious about things as life gives them an opportunity to learn and gain more knowledge from the events that occur in their life.
Primo Levi was an Italian Jewish Anti-fascist who was arrested in 1943, during the Second World War. The memoir, “If this is a Man”, written immediately after Levi’s release from the Auschwitz concentration camp, not only provides the readers with Levi’s personal testimony of his experience in Auschwitz, but also invites the readers to consider the implications of life in the concentration camp for our understanding of human identity. In Levi’s own words, the memoir was written to provide “documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind”. The lack of emotive words and the use of distant tone in Levi’s first person narration enable the readers to visualize the cold, harsh reality in Auschwitz without taking away the historical credibility. Levi’s use of poetic and literary devices such as listing, repetition, and symbolism in the removal of one’s personal identification; the use of rhetorical questions and the inclusion of foreign languages in the denial of basic human rights; the use of bestial metaphors and choice of vocabulary which directly compares the prisoner of Auschwitz to animals; and the use of extended metaphor and symbolism in the character Null Achtzehn all reveal the concept of dehumanization that was acted upon Jews and other minorities.
Strangeways, Al. "'The Boot in the Face': The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of