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Thematic analysis paper
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FIND WORDS TO REPLACE ‘HOLOCAUST’ AND ‘HORRIFIC’
Central Theme: Traumatic events in your life can haunt you.
Eunji Kwon
Brown Class
Night & Slaughterhouse-Five Essay
‘Post-traumatic stress disorder starts out with nightmares, flashbacks and actually reliving the event. And this happens over and over and over and over in your mind. If you let it go on, it can become chronic and become hard if not impossible to treat.’ This is a quote by Dale Archer, a famous psychiatrist, and the quote explains the central theme of Night and Slaughterhouse-Five; Traumatic events in your life can haunt you. MORE EXPLAINATION
In the book Night, Elie was thinking to himself, reminding him about the painful and atrocious experience he had to go through while in the Auschwitz concentration camp. “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed…Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams into ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.” (Wiesel 34) He repeats “Never shall I forget…” over and over again before stating each reason because it is true. He will never forget that night. He is reflecting upon his first night in the concentration camp, and its lasting effect in life. The images are permanently burned into his brain and they haunt him. He also uses this repetition to add emphasis to the statements. It seems like he is saying it to himself in almost a crazed manner, I’ll never forget, I’ll never forget, I’ll never forget. This part of the book is a turning point. It is Elie reflecting on what he saw and realizing that he is no longer safe. In conclusion, the horrific imag...
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...ing about the night Dresden was bombed. He and the other guards were all in the slaughterhouse, when the bomb was dropped. He described that Dresden was one big flame, and the one flame ate everything organic, and everything that would burn. “The sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like a moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.” (Vonnegut 178). Dresden was untouched by war before the bombing, with factories, industries, and recreational facilities that were operating perfectly. After the bombing, nothing was left, everyone in the beautiful city of Dresden were dead. Billy was horrified about the fact that the AMERICANS??? Dropped the bomb, killing thousands of innocent people who has nothing to do with the war, including women and children. MORE EVIDENCE & CONCLUSION
Did you know you could kill 6,000,000, and capture about 1 million people in one lifetime? In “Night” Elie Wiesel talks about the life of one of those 7 million people, going into detail about the living conditions, and also talking about the experiences in the book that happened to him. The book explains how it felt to be in a concentration camp, and how it changed a person so much you couldn’t tell the difference between the dead and the living. Elie Wiesel is the author and he was only around 15 when this story happened, so this is his story and how the events in the story changed him. So in the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the main character, “Elie,” is affected by the events in the book such as losing faith, becoming immune to death, and emotionally changing throughout the course of the book.
Within the novel Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Billy Pilgrim claims to have come “unstuck” in time. Having survived through being a Prisoner of War and the destruction of Dresden during World War II, and having been a prisoner used to clear away debris of the destruction, there can be little doubt that Pilgrim’s mental state was unstable. Furthermore, it may be concluded that Pilgrim, due to the effects of having been a Prisoner of War, and having been witness to the full magnitude of destruction, suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which caused him to review the events over and over during the course of his life. In order to understand how these factors, the destruction of Dresden and ‘PTSD’, came to make Billy Pilgrim “unstuck” in time, one must review over the circumstances surrounding those events.
Night by Elie Wiesel was a memoir on one of the worst things to happen in human history, the Holocaust. A terrible time where the Nazi German empire started to take control of eastern Europe during WWII. This book tells of the terrible things that happened to the many Jewish people of that time. This time could easily change grown men, and just as easily a boy of 13. Elie’s relationship with God and his father have been changed forever thanks to the many atrocities committed at that time.
Night is an autobiography by a man named Eliezer Wiesel. The autobiography is a quite disturbing record of Elie’s childhood in the Nazi death camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald during world war two. While Night is Elie Wiesel’s testimony about his experiences in the Holocaust, Wiesel is not, precisely speaking, the story’s protagonist. Night is narrated by a boy named Eliezer who represents Elie, but details set apart the character Eliezer from the real life Elie. For instance, Eliezer wounds his foot in the concentration camps, while Elie actually wounded his knee. Wiesel fictionalizes seemingly unimportant details because he wants to distinguish his narrator from himself. It is almost impossibly painful for a survivor to write about his Holocaust experience, and the mechanism of a narrator allows Wiesel to distance himself somewhat from the experience, to look in from the outside.
In conclusion, in the novel Night, the Germens had so much force and power that no minority (Jewish individuals) could stop them. As a result, the Germans took advantage of the power they had and killed a lot of Jews in very unpleasant ways, thus illustrating inhumanity. The Germans had no feelings or sympathy for their actions and through the two quotations provided, it is evident of how the Jewish society lived in fear and helplessness. Elie will never forget what he saw the first night he was at camp and this was the build up of fear, also how the Germens executed the child shows that they are heartless by making the innocent suffer. These examples were very brutal and inhumane ways of dealing with the Jews, as a result the Germans took advantage of their power in the wrong way, abused it by doing whatever they desire.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five the main character Billy Pilgrim experiences few emotions during his time in World War II. His responses to people and events lack intensity or passion. Throughout the novel Billy describes his time travel to different moments in his life, including his experience with the creatures of Tralfamadore and the bombing of Dresden. He wishes to die during most of the novel and is unable to connect with almost anyone on Earth. The fictional planet Tralfamadore appears to be Billy’s only way of escaping the horrors of war, and acts as coping mechanism. Billy seems to be a soldier with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as he struggles to express feelings and live in his reality. At the beginning of the novel the narrator proposes his reason for writing the book is to explain what happened in the Dresden fire bombing, yet he focuses on Billy’s psyche more than the bombing itself. PTSD prevents Billy from living a healthy life, which shows readers that the war does not stop after the fighting is over and the aftermath is ongoing. Billy Pilgrim’s story portrays the bombing and war in a negative light to readers, as Vonnegut shows the damaging effects of war on an individual, such as misperception of time, disconnect from peers, and inability to feel strong emotions, to overall create a stronger message.
The theme of Night is resilience. To be resilient is to be strong and able to bounce back when things happen. Elie shows resilience many times throughout the course of Night, and some of these times included when Elie and his block are being forced to run to the new camp, when somebody attempts to kill him and when he loses his father to sickness. When Elie is with the group of people running to the new camp, he knows that he needs to persevere and be resilient, even when the person that he is talking to gives up (Wiesel 86). Elie tries to tell somebody that they need to keep going, and that it will not be much longer, but when they give up, Elie does not seem to pity the boy, and he stays strong. Somebody also attempted to strangle Elie while
By looking at Billy’s condition during the war, we can see that the war was not as glorious as the countries wanted you to think which at the time was not obvious. This adds a critical and significant point of view on the war to Vonnegut’s anti-war book. During WWII, the fighting countries didn’t want to show how terrible war really was, instead they showed images of patriotic men fighting in the war. In reality, these “men” were just kids out of high school and some from college, not ready to fight battles in a war. Vonnegut tries to show this in his book by inserting passages throughout Slaughter House Five, to help explain this to his readers. By describing Billy’s poor body structure and inadequate clothing and tools, one can clearly see
The ground is frozen, parents sob over their children, stomachs growl, stiff bodies huddle together to stay slightly warm. This was a recurrent scene during World War II. Night is a literary memoir of Elie Wiesel’s tenure in the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel created a character reminiscent of himself with Eliezer. Eliezer experienced cruelty, stress, fear, and inhumanity at a very young age, fifteen. Through this, he struggled to maintain his Jewish faith, survive with his father, and endure the hardships placed on his body and mind.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five; providing details that indicate both Vonnegut and his protagonist Billy Pilgrim suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In the book Night, Elie’s father was very ill and he desperately needs help from his son. His father asked for water and wanted to talk with his son, but Elie refused to talk with him and give him some water. Also, he remained calm when his father was harassed by the guards. In the book, Elie said “Then I had to go to sleep”(Wiesel 112) and after his father’s death, the thing he said wasn’t about his sadness. It was about his freedom. He said, “Free at last”(Wiesel 112). Elie is not the old Elie anymore. Because of the circumstance of the camp, the pure and caring boy changed into a boy with an empty heart. Elie says “Since father's death, nothing mattered to me anymore”(Wiesel 113). His heart that was filled with joy and caring
Night by Elie Wiesel is an autobiographical novel recording Mr. Wiesel’s experiences during the World War II holocaust. As a 15 year old boy Elie was torn from his home and placed in a concentration camp. He and his father were separated from his mother and his sisters. It is believed that they were put to death in the fiery pits of Auschwitz. The entire story is one of calm historical significance while there is a slight separation between the emotional trauma of what are occurring, and the often-detached voice of the author.
Kurt Vonnegut’s background had an endless influence upon his writing. In his early years, Vonnegut was a private in the 106th infantry division in World War II. He and five scouts were caught behind enemy lines, and then captured. They were held POWs and were beaten on various occasions. In 1945, they witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany. Kept during this time in a slaughterhouse, this is part of the inspiration for Slaughterhouse-five. After being released from the Slaughterhouse, Vonnegut called Dresden “utter destruction” and “carnage unfathomable”. This distressing time in his life led to one of the many themes of Slaughterhouse-five which is that nothing good can come from war and a massacre. This theme is expressed in the story when Billy Pilgrim says “Birds were talking. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim ’Poo-tee-weet?’” After the bombing, the POWs had to gather the bodies for a mass grave and then all the remains were set on fire. Vonnegut and the other prisoners were only there for a few more months, until they were rescued. The lasting effect this awful war caused Vonnegut had significant affect upon his writing; on return to the U.S., he was awarded a purple heart.
Elie goes to Auschwitz at an innocent, young stage in his life. Due to his experiences at this concentration camp, he loses his faith, his bond with his father, and his innocence. Situations as horrendous as the Holocaust will drastically change people, no matter what they were like before the event, and this is evident with Elie's enormous change throughout the memoir Night.
...e has to deal with the death of his family, the death of his innocence, and the death of his God at the very young age of fifteen. He retells the horrors of the concentration camp, of starvation, beatings, torture, illness, and hard labor. He comes to question how God could let this happen and to redefine the existence of God in the concentration camp. This book is also filled with acts of kindness and compassion amid the degradation and violence. It seems that for every act of violence that is committed, Elie counteracts with some act of compassion. Night is a reflection on goodness and evil, on responsibility to family and community, on the struggle to forge identity and to maintain faith. It shows one boy's transformation from spiritual idealism to spiritual death via his journey through the Nazi's failed attempt to conquer and erase a people and their faith.