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Recommended: Idea of good vs evil
"The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces"~Philip Zimbardo. It is hard to not cross the line between good and evil because if someone is getting you mad, you might want to harm them in some way. But you have keep your cool and let it go. Being good or evil is your own choice. Even if you are good, you always have an evil side. This quote fits perfectly because it talks about how evil is really only in people under certain situations. People are essentially good, but under certain circumstances, turn evil. To start, Wiesel went through the struggle of the concentration camp and watched everybody turn evil. Night showed everybody losing their faith and hope. Elie wasn't even crying or sad when his father died. He felt free. This shows that he turned evil without even knowing it. "Amd deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my freebie conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last! (Wiesel 228). Elie turns to evil for answers. At first, …show more content…
he starts with hope and faith that it will be over soon. Later in the book, he loses his faith in God and only has hope. Hope didn't help him because the point where he turned evil was when his father died. Everybody starts out good as babies. As time goes on, things change. It is on their choice to turn evil, or to stay good. In addition, Sherman Alexie forced readers to see the food in her characters.
True diary of a part time Indian is a very inspiring book. They let you see the good in everyone and they try not to focus on the bad. "Instead, it was Gordy who defended me. He stood with his textbook and dropped it. WHOMP!! Gordy showed a lot of courage standing up to a teacher like that. And his encourage inspired others. Penelope stood and dropped her textbook. And the Roger stood and dropped his textbook. WHOMP!! And then the other basketball players did the same (Sherman 175). Junior was around negative people all throughout his life. Some of these people, like Rowdy, was able to be good but under certain circumstances, become evil. All people start out good. It is on your own to decide if your going to stay good or turn evil. Even if someone is good, but gets pushed beyond their point, they will snap and break out into
evil. Furthermore, Golding depicts the boys to be good and innocent at first, but without adults on the island, things get deranged. LOF shows that evil is overcoming the boys. Towards the end, there are some murders and they try to kill Ralph. "He prepares a stick, with points sharpened at each end, on which to mount Ralph's head" (Golding Ch. 12). The boys start out fine on the island. Without adults keeping them in order, they turn in chaos resulting in deaths. Everyone has people they can't stand. With adults around, they act like their friends. But when there is no adults, they turn evil and want to fight. Overall, people are born good, but under the wrong influences they may become poisoned. With the wrong influence, they may or may not turn evil. Hanging out with the wrong people can cause harm to you or others because they are going to do bad things. It is your choice to hang out with them or leave. Also, when you are arguing with someone, it is important to not engage in physical activity or do harm to anybody. Those actions are considered evil and you will no longer be good. Do not cross the line between good and evil because you won't like what's waiting on the other side.
Elie Wiesel writes about his personal experience of the Holocaust in his memoir, Night. He is a Jewish man who is sent to a concentration camp, controlled by an infamous dictator, Hitler. Elie is stripped away everything that belongs to him. All that he has worked for in his life is taken away from him instantly. He is even separated from his mother and sister. On the other side of this he is fortunate to survive and tell his story. He describes the immense cruel treatment that he receives from the Nazis. Even after all of the brutal treatment and atrocities he experiences he does not hate the world and everything in it, along with not becoming a brute.
When they first arrived at the camp, his father asked their Blockalteste where the toilets were. “Then as if waking from a deep sleep, he slapped my father with such force that he fell down and then crawled back to his place on all fours. I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck in front of me, and I had not even blinked...Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh.”(Wiesel,39) This shows that Elie would have beaten the guard had he been allowed to. This next quote shows Elie much later, near Buchenwald in a cattle car, cramped and starving. His father’s corpse has just been thrown off the train “And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like:Free at last!...”(Wiesel,112) This shows Elie thinking that if he searched inside himself for remorse, he would have found something that said he was free from a
Imagery is one of the most effective methods Wiesel used in his biography to portray forms of inhumanity. “Not far from us, flames, huge flames were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there… small children. Babies” (32). In this case, Elie does not wish to live if his eyes were telling the truth. This alone refers to extreme cruelty, describing the inhumanity in which the suppressed races endured inside the many concentration camps. Following several weeks at work in an electrical-fittings factory, Elie quotes a hanging which he remembers quite well. “He was a young boy from Warsaw… The Lagerälteste
... death. He no longer thought of his father and mother, and when he dreamed, it was about an extra ration of soup or bread (Wiesel 131). On April 11, 1945 Buchenwald was liberated. Three days after, Elie became very ill and was transferred to a hospital where he spent two weeks between life and death (Wiesel 133). I do not blame Elie Wiesel for the changes in the relations with his father because in the end all he was doing was surviving. If Elie would have intervened in the various situations that occurred in the camps to his father or if he would have kept on giving his rations to his father, he might have died also, either from getting beat by an SS officer or from starvation. As inhumane as it might seem, it really was not because it was the only way to survive.
The battle of good versus evil is present in all aspects of life. Actions taken by people can determine how others view them. Some choose to do what is right and good, while others choose what is wrong and evil. Many characters are forced to choose between the two, and some do not foresee the consequences of their actions. In the book Peace Like a River by Leif Enger, actions committed by the Davy, Jeremiah, and Jeremiah’s friends, both good and evil, always have consequences.
In another example, Elie himself witnessed a furnace in action burning infants as the smoke and fire started to pump into the air. His reaction was rather fearful and unsure if he was going to be next when in line. He knew that what he was seeing was real, and that it was truly brutal. And lastly, the march from Buna to Gleiwitz. This was the winter march in which Elie noticed that Hitler was actually sticking to his word about getting rid of all Jews. He keeps saying “It’s actually happening” over and over again to express his fear, concern, and state of mind. With the situation at the time, it was clear to see how one can be fearful of death and how it can strike at any moment. Then again, some just left for dead. The wrong in this was when Elie noticed that the march caused the Jews to turn against each other as some trampled across one another to move or later on when a kid killed his dad for a couple of bread crumbs. In conclusion, free will and conscience reside in any individual and makes it completely possible for one to judge right from
It can be understood that at that moment, Elie was losing his mentality. Even so, he still had the sense of loneliness that most would have in that situation. Elie was hopeless, wondering where his God was, and why he was silent. Elie never doubted his belief in God, he doubted that the God was not his God, that the God was a terrible ruler. It is important to remember that this is extremely early in Wiesel’s experience with the concentration camps, and his piousness is already decreasing.
He seemed to be just going through the motions during his time in the camps. “In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.” (Mauriac XXI) This quote shows how Wiesel felt like he was a stranger to the religion, community, and faith. Elie Wiesel couldn’t understand why God would hurt people, and most of all why he was spared.
An estimated 1/3 of all Jewish people who were alive were grotesquely tortured and murdered during the Holocaust. Those who were not murdered went through changes mentally, physically, and spiritually. This changed many people’s identities to where they seemed like a completely different person. Elie was one of the many people whose identity had changed throughout their time at the death camps.
In his book Night Mr. Elie Wiesel shares his experiences about the camps and how cruel all of the Jews were treated in that period. In fact, he describes how he was beaten and neglected by the SS officers in countless occasions. There are very few instances where decent humans are tossed into certain conditions where they are treated unfairly, and cruel. Mr. Wiesel was a victim of the situation many times while he was in the camps. Yet he did not act out, becoming a brute himself, while others were constantly being transformed into brutes themselves. Mr. Wiesel was beaten so dreadfully horrible, however, for his safety, he decided to not do anything about it. There were many more positions where Mr. Wiesel was abused, malnourished, and easily could have abandoned his father but did not.
The lines that define good and evil are not written in black and white; these lines tend to blur into many shades of grey allowing good and evil to intermingle with each another in a single human being. Man is not inherently good or evil but they are born innocent without any values or sense of morality until people impart their philosophies of life to them. In the words of John Locke:
Wiesel's Night is about what the Holocaust did, not just to the Jews, but by extension, to humanity. People all over the world were devastated by this atrocious act, and there are still people today who haven't overcome the effects. One example of the heinous acts of the Germans that stands out occurs at the end of the war, when Elie and the rest of the camp of Buna is being forced to transfer to Gleiwitz. This transfer is a long, arduous, and tiring journey for all who are involved. The weather is painfully cold, and snow fell heavily; the distance is greater than most people today will even dream of walking. The huge mass of people is often forced to run, and if one collapses, is injured, or simply can no longer bear the pain, they are shot or trampled without pity. An image that secures itself in Elie's memory is that of Rabbi Eliahou's son's leaving the Rabbi for dead. The father and son are running together when the father begins to grow tired. As the Rabbi falls farther and farther behind his son, his son runs on, pretending not to see what is happening to his father. This spectacle causes Elie to think of what he would do if his father ever became as weak as the Rabbi. He decides that he would never leave his father, even if staying with him would be the cause of his death. The German forces are so adept at breaking the spirits of the Jews that we can see the effects throughout Elie's novel. Elie's faith in God, above all other things, is strong at the onset of the novel, but grows weaker as it goes on. We see this when Elie's father politely asks the gypsy where the lavoratories are. Not only does the gypsy not grace his father with a response, but he also delivers a blow to his head that sent him to the floor. Elie watches the entire exhibition, but doesn't even blink. He realizes that nothing, not even his faith in God, can save him from the physical punishment that would await him if he tried to counterattack the gypsy. If the gypsy's attack had come just one day earlier, Elie probably would have struck back. However, the effect of the spiritual beating by the Germans was already being felt.
Wiesel, in essence, is now the same as Moshe the Beadle, one of the first Jewish deportees and the only one to return to the city to warn others. “He told his story and that of his companions," (page 4, 5th paragraph). Elie has become Moshe. He tells his story, not for himself, for he has already experienced the horrors, but to make sure that people are aware of what has happened, and so that it never happens again. The mood of night is harder to interpret.
After being forced into concentration camps, Elie was rudely awakened into reality. Traumatizing incidents such as Nazi persecution or even the mistreatment among fellow prisoners pushed Elie to realize the cruelty around him; Or even the wickedness Elie himself is capable of doing. This resulted in the loss of faith, innocence, and the close bonds with others. Throughout his recollections, it is clear that Elie has a constant struggle with his belief in God. Prior to Auschwitz, Elie was motivated, even eager, to learn about Jewish mysticism.
...ow much more independent he has become. His reaction to his father's death also represents this loss of innocence: “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears” (Wiesel 112). This scene reveals the fact that Elie has realized that there are many evils in the world. His lack of emotion and tears shows that he understands how bad the Nazis' actions are and how cruel the world can be. This realization ultimately represents his loss of innocence and maturation.