In the novel Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston and the novel Maus by Art Spiegelman the theme of suffering has a damaging effect on the human spirit. Suffering in both these stories come in different forms such as emotional, physical, and mental. No matter the form, it is still suffering.
Food depravation is a method that people use to affect the human spirit in a negative way. In the story Maus by Art Spiegelman, food is used to make the prisoners weak. For example, at the concentration camp Art’s dad is talking to his fellow prisoner Mandelbaum “I spilled most of my soup too. When I asked for more, they BEAT me" (Spiegelman pg. 29). This affects the human spirit because when people typically ask for more food, they don't get beaten. Food is also used as a currency in the camps. In this scene, Art’s dad is talking to the gestapo and the gestapo wants Vladek to fix his boot; “Can you fix this? I’ll give you a day’s ration of bread. For a day’s ration of bread I can fix anything! Next day I had the boot ready for this gestapo….Hmm. He left the boot and went without one word. And he came back with a whole sausage. You did a good job” (Spiegelman pg. 61). Food is used as currency because in this case Vladek had a skill of fixing boots and his reward for doing a good job was a whole sausage. This shows how valuable food is in the concentration camps. In the story Farewell to Manzanar, food is also used to destroy the human spirit. Jeanne, the author, is being fed by the staff at the camp and her meal was ".... scoops of canned Vienna sausage, canned string beans, steamed rice that had been cooked too long, and on top of the rice a serving of canned apricots. The Caucasian servers were thinking that...
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...pg. 23).This scene shows a survival mood because they are all trying to do their best to stay warm. In these camps, the guards did not provide the people with a housing heat source. The mood is an effective tool for expressing the suffering that occurred in both stories.
Suffering is a very real aspect in the story of Maus and Farewell to Manzanar. Suffering has devastating effects on a person’s spirits and wellbeing. Suffering did not just occur during the time of World War II; it is still a shattering reality occurring today. People today all over the world are still suffering withered it be physical, emotional, or mental; it is still suffering.
Works Cited
Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki., and James D. Houston. Farewell to Manzanar. Austin: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2000. Print.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor's Tale. New York: Pantheon, 1986. N. pag. Print.
“It is your reaction to adversity, not the adversity itself, that determines how you life’s story will develop” (Dieter F. Uchtdorf). Most people can deal with difficulties, but their reactions to the hardships are different. Only some people can manage their problems. We should try to manage our behaviors in tough situations. If we can deal with our situations, we can overcome difficulties easily. In the story of Farewell to Manzanar written by Jeanne Wakatsuki, the story shows how war can change humans, their life, and their ranks. Although all of the characters of her book face the same problems due to the war and the camps they had to live in, they responded to those situations differently. All of them presented
While obtaining food seemed to be the entire purpose of life for the people imprisoned in the camps, it often killed more people than it saved. Though focusing on food seemed like a logical thing to do when you are being starved, it was not always very effective in helping people survive. There are many situations in the book illustrating how living for the sole purpose of acquiring food—under any condition—could turn out to be lethal.
Suffering can be found on three different levels, mental, physical and emotional. In an everyday life the three levels can be found at school, at work or even on the streets, for example people who are living on the street generally suffer mentally. In The Book Thief by Markus Zusak the topic that suffering exists on three different levels is shown throughout the book. In The Book Thief the author shows that the three levels of suffering exist and impacts multiple characters throughout the book . The three levels of suffering impacts many characters such as, the Jews, Liesel and Max.
In the novels, The Help, and Water for Elephants, the authors show the pain and suffering of characters throughout their journey. The characters in the novels suffer through oppression; they suffer through physical and emotional
Food is essential to basic life. It provides people with the energy to think, speak, walk, talk, and breathe. In preparation for the Jews deportation from the ghettos of Transylvania, “the (Jewish) women were busy cooking eggs, roasting meat, and baking cakes”(Wiesel, 13). The Jewish families realized how crucial food was to their lives even before they were faced with the daily condition of famine and death in the concentration camps. The need for food was increased dramatically with the introduction of the famine-like conditions of the camps. Wiesel admitted that, although he was incredibly hungry, he had refused to eat the plate of thick soup they served to the prisoners on the first day of camp because of his nature of being a “spoiled child”. But his attitude changed rapidly as he began to realize that his life span was going to be cut short if he continued to refuse to eat the food they served him. “By the third day, I (Elie Wiesel) was eating any kind of soup hungrily” (Wiesel, 40). His desire to live superseded his social characteristic of being “pampered”. Remarque also uses his characters to show to how a balanced diet promotes a person’s good health. Paul Bäumer uses food to encourage Franz Kemmerich, his sick friend, “eat decently and you’ll soon be well again…Eating is the main thing” (Remarque, 30). Paul Bäumer feels that good food can heal all afflictions. The bread supply of the soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front was severely threatened when the rats became more and more numerous.
Vol. 8. Chicago, IL: World Book, 2009. Print. G Freeman, Shanna.
Suffering is apart of life, just like joy and love is. We can never choose how life treats us but we can always choose how we react and get back up again. Through Fever 1793 we see up close and personal how suffering can affect us, and how sometimes it can affect us in positive ways. How suffering can help turn the page to the next chapter in our lives. How suffering doesn’t always mean losing but also gaining.
The sleeping arrangement were poor. Their bed was made from thin straw and cardboard, they had old blankets (38). Early in the morning, prisoner are awoken and rush into the freezing cold in order to get morning bread. Prisoners think that the people next to them have a bigger piece of bread they will trade it. But in reality, the piece are almost the same size. In Monowitz-Buna concentration camp, bread is money to prisoners, there a lot of bargaining and trading happening
(It should be noted that when describing hardships of the concentration camps, understatements will inevitably be made. Levi puts it well when he says, ?We say ?hunger?, we say ?tiredness?, ?fear?, ?pain?, we say ?winter? and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day?? (Levi, 123).)
The question of suffering comes up much when talking about, or practicing any religion. Many ask why people suffer, and what causes suffering? The various religions try to answer these questions in their own way. Pico Iyer’s editorial, “The Value of Suffering” addresses the questions of suffering and how it is handled. This article could be compared to the Bhagavad-Gita which also addresses and explains suffering through different stories of the interactions of humans and different Gods. One can specifically look at “The Second Teaching” in the Bhagavad-Gita, which explains the interaction between a man named Arjuna and the god Krishna. In it Arjuna is suffering because he does not want to fight in a war and with people whom he should be worshiping. Krishna says to fight because the souls of the people will forever live on, and because he needs to fulfill his Dharma. With what is known about the Bhagavad-Gita and how Iyer thinks about the subject, Iyer would agree with how the Bhagavad-Gita address suffering.
Despite its prevalence, suffering is always seen an intrusion, a personal attack on its victims. However, without its presence, there would never be anyway to differentiate between happiness and sadness, nor good and evil. It is encoded into the daily lives people lead, and cannot be avoided, much like the prophecies described in Antigone. Upon finding out that he’d murdered his father and married his mother,
Like an animal, the pleasure comes not from the taste, but from the sensation of satisfying even a little bit of that perpetual hunger. The prisoner Glebov in “In the Night” does not even care “whether [food] tasted good or not,” because he is only concerned with the sensation that accompanies the breadcrumbs he has swept off the table (11). The entire notion of eating is different in Kolyma, due entirely to the fact that the prisoners are plagued by an incessant hunger. In the story “Lend-Lease,” many of the prisoners are so desperate for something to satisfy their hunger that they eat the machine grease, claiming that it was butter sent as part of the Lend-Lease deal with the Americans. Eating the machine grease would put the prisoners at a new low from the point of view of an outsider, but they see themselves as victors, enjoying the grease left on their fingertips for the next few hours. The narrator in the story “Condensed Milk” mentions how hunger had “dulled and weakened” all of their feelings, especially envy (80). Their constant hunger took away all of their strength, and thus there was no strength left to feel any emotion. It is in this sense that the prisoners of these work camps are most like animals, where they no longer feel emotion like regular human beings but instead lack the ability to
Primo Levi tells the readers the explicit details of the concentration camp Auschwitz, in his memoir, “Survival in Auschwitz.” The way in which the author talks about the camp is as if it is its own society. There is a very different and very specific way of life at the camp; their basic needs are provided for them, but only in the simplest form in order to have a small chance of survival. There is no clean, drinkable water, so instead they drink coffee, they eat soup twice a day, and a small amount of bread (26). There are thousands of diverse people living in the camp, who are forced to live with each other and work in a factory, reducing their self-worth to merely factors of production. The author illustrates the only purpose for the Jews is work; “This camp is a work-camp, in German one says Arbeitslager; all the prisoners, there are about ten thousand, work in a factory which produces a type of rubber called Buna, so th...
The concept of suffering plays an important role in Christianity, regarding such matters as moral conduct, spiritual advancement and ultimate destiny. Indeed an emphasis on suffering pervades the Gospel of Mark where, it can be argued, we are shown how to "journey through suffering" (Ditzel 2001) in the image of the "Suffering Son of Man" (Mark 8:32), Jesus Christ. Although theologians have suggested that Mark was written to strengthen the resolve of the early Christian community (Halpern 2002, Mayerfeld 2005), the underlying moral is not lost on a modern reader grappling with multifarious challenges regarding faith in the face of suffering. In his article "A Christian Response to Suffering", William Marravee (1987) describes suffering as an "experience over which we men and women continue to stumble and fall". The way we view God is crucial to the way we view suffering according to Marravee, who delineates the disparity between a view of God as an ‘outsider’ and the biblical image of God – where God is an ‘insider’ who suffers with us in our struggle. This essay seeks to explain the Christian view of suffering and the purpose suffering can have in our lives.
Suffering can be defined as an experience of discomfort suffered by a person during his life. The New York Times published an article entitled what suffering does, by David Brooks (2014). In this article, Brooks explains how suffering plays an important role in our pursuit of happiness. He explains firstly that happiness is found through experiences and then, suffering can also be a motivation in our pursuit of happiness. In other words, suffering is a fearful but necessary gift to acquire happiness. This paper is related to motivation and emotion, two keys words to the pursuit of happiness (King, 2010).