Dehumanization in Night Essay -- The Holocaust Experience, Elie Wiese

Many themes exist in Night, Elie Wiesel’s nightmarish story of his Holocaust experience. From normal life in a small town to physical abuse in concentration camps, Night chronicles the journey of Wiesel’s teenage years. Neither Wiesel nor any of the Jews in Sighet could have imagined the horrors that would befall them as their lived changed under the Nazi regime. The Jews all lived peaceful, civilized lives before German occupation. Eliezer Wiesel was concerned with mysticism and his father was â€Å"more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin† (4). This would change in the coming weeks, as Jews are segregated, sent to camps, and both physically and emotionally abused. These changes and abuse would dehumanize men and cause them to revert to basic instincts. Wiesel and his peers devolve from civilized human beings to savage animals during the course of Night. Segregation from the rest of society begins the dehumanization of Sighet Jews. The first measure taken by the Hungarian Police against Jews is to label them with yellow stars. Early in Night, while life is still normal despite German occupation of their town, Wiesel explains: â€Å"Three days later, a new decree: every Jew had to wear the yellow star† (11). This decree is demoralizing to Jews because it labels them and sets them apart from the rest of Sighet’s population. Like trees marked for logging or dogs marked with owner tags, many people in Sighet are marked with yellow stars, to reveal their Jewish faith. Avni describes Wiesel and the Jews as being â€Å"propelled out of himself, out of humanity, out of the world as he knew it† (Avni 140). The Jews are taken out of the normal lives they have led for years and are beginning to follow new rules... ...ely so, since they are so close to death. Their lives are only about death. Through segregation, loss of identity, and abuse, Wiesel and the prisoners around him devolve from civilized human beings into savage animals. The yellow stars begin separation from society, followed by ghettos and transports. Nakedness and haircuts, then new names, remove each prisoner’s identity, and physical abuse in the form of malnourishment, night marches, and physical beatings wear down prisoners. By the end of Night, the prisoners are ferocious from the experiences under German rule and, as Avni puts it, â€Å"a living dead, unfit for life† (Avni 129). The prisoners not only revert to animal instincts, but experience such mental trauma that normal life with other people may be years away. Night dramatically illustrates the severe dehumanization that occurred under Hitler’s rule.

Creative Writing – The Bliss Of Acceptance

The plane's contact with the ground woke me from my semi-conscious state and I looked around anxiously, to see where I was. We had finally landed, and I felt life flow back into my limbs as I stretched in my seat. A gentle murmur rose as the plane slowed down, and the reassuring sound of the pilot echoed through the plane. â€Å"Ladies and gentlemen, we have now arrived in Delhi, the temperature is a pleasant forty three degrees with cloudless skies, and local time is four fifteen PM†. Stewardesses strutted up and down isles collecting litter, and passengers began to abscond from the plane. As I lifted myself to my feet, still in a half alert state from jetlag-induced fatigue, I stumbled into the sunshine outside. The blue sky dazzled my agitated eyes, and I grumbled to myself in irritation. The scorching hot sun was already upon me, burning my unconditioned skin in a similar way to a magnifying glass burning an ant. Hours followed as we collected bags; showed passports and performed countless other tasks that made me want to curl up on the floor and lapse into hibernation. Whether I was in Delhi or London, I was still exhausted and cantankerous. Finally we managed to obtain our car, and, as I had suspected, a long trip hundreds of miles upwards to Northern India followed. On our journey, my irritation began to crumble. The first village we stopped at, where I could appreciate the scenery, was near the Punjab, in a rural area. The village itself looked primitive and simplistic, with buildings partially finished, abandoned with no roofs or waterproofing, like an unwanted animal abandoned on the street. Poverty reigned rampant, and incoherent languages flood towards me. We drew nearer to the village market, passing by unsavoury looking beggars and lone children. An old man peered at me through a half developed cataract, before falling into a coughing fit. The world around me seemed dismal. In a split moment, my impression changed. Just as the flood washes dirt from its path, so my notions about India changed. We turned the corner into the market square, and were met with a blissful scene; a crowded square full of laughing, shouting and commotion; stall owners bellowing at the top of their voices to advertise their goods, and amidst the joyful chaos young children scuttled around like playful insects. A rich variety of vivid colours met my eye in the form of scarlet apples, striking yellow bananas and earthy brown yams. Countless fruits held my gaze, which I had never known before. The poor no longer seemed menacing; a half smile on their face was noticeable, as if they were simply satisfied by the atmosphere. Everyone around me seemed happy; and the first question that I asked myself was, why? Back in London for a moment, the answer arrived. A grey sky enveloped the city, and people trudged in their various directions, minding their own businesses and keeping themselves to themselves. After living in my home for ten years, there were still people on my street I didn't know. However, the main question I was posed, which was how could people with little money, health care, and a low standard of living be happier than those living in a modernised world with excessive amounts of money and a high standard of living? The sad answer was, that we appear to have forgotten how to obtain happiness. Epicurus, a Greek philosopher living around 300 BC, spent much of his life finding out what was required to obtain true happiness. A well-known phrase of his is: The human soul is as material and mortal as the human body. To live a good life, is to exercise prudence and to enjoy life through stimulating the senses, subjecting oneself to tranquillity and scientific study. † Later, however, he concluded that to obtain true happiness one must have a number of things. Friends, a frugal lifestyle, time and thought were all considered prerequisites for happiness. Visualising the crowded metropolis of London in my mind, trying to ignore the shouting of the stall keepers intent on making me buy their spinach, I felt that we had all these. What was it that these people had that we did not? This question remained on my mind throughout my trip in India; through the bustle of the city in Jalundar; the peaceful tranquillity in the village; the faint sounds of gunshots near Kashmir; even during the humorous incident of seeing a man squat in the middle of a field only feet away from a road. Sitting back at home in London listening to the gentle drumming of the rain, I contemplated why it was so hard for the Western man to gain happiness. Like the correct document finally being found in a stack of papers, I finally produced the answer. A Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist once said: â€Å"Humans are afflicted with all external forms of life: we are subject to life and death, pleasure and pain, love and fear, good and evil, beautiful and ugly. We tend to sway, or strive towards one side, and reject its opposite. There is no real escape of one or the other, yet we somehow believe that sooner or later, we will be able to conquer the other side if we stay focused long enough. † The reason the average man in the West could not find happiness lies in acceptance. Driven relentlessly by the Capitalist machine, we are constantly told we must improve, do better, get promoted, find a better job, or save for the latest electronic gadget. The real obstacle in the way of happiness was an excess of opportunity in the West, which in turn sows the seeds in men's mind that they can achieve better all the time, leaving only a handful of people who achieve their goal, and reject the rest of the spoiled harvest of the population who are scarred with depression and left with an 'empty feeling' in life: that they have achieved nothing. It could be said that pain is essential for pleasure, if pleasure is to be known as pleasure. If we did not know of evil in the world, then how would we be able to distinguish good? Denial of one of these extremes is similar to denying the existence of both. If we believe that evil cannot exist, or that we can block it from our lives, then good cannot exist, because then there is nothing to measure it against. However, if we accept that both good and evil exist in our lives, it can allow us to feel more at home in the world, perhaps obtaining happiness. Looking back to India as evidence for this, I remembered an encounter with a family of peasants. The husband of the family was a peasant, working for the richer men as a farmer, constantly toiling at the fields every day with no hope of extra pay or advancement in his job. The wife of the family took care of their four children, all destined for the same lifestyle, in what many would call an endless, and pointless cycle. However, far from pitying them, I envied them. They were contented with their lives; they earned enough money to live under a roof with adequate food and drink. The end result of this was that they were happy; they had no ambitions to gain wealth, and were satisfied with their lot. To be truly happy we must not linger in the past, or hypothesise about the future, but live life for the moment, and enjoy its small pleasures. By losing the foresight of the future, or hindsight in the past, we open up that world of acceptance. Some people will steal because they see that they have something more in their future. Some people will perform good deeds because they desire to feel better about themselves. In this society, we can never truly be completely happy. From our first few years of life we have ambitions: to decide what we will be when we grow up, and how we will choose to live our lives. Without these ambitions society would, unfortunately, not function correctly; no one would have any motivation to do well at their jobs and get promoted, as the idea of a Marxist/Communist society shows. It seems to me the human population has dug itself into a pit where the light of true happiness is growing more and more remote as we dig further and further down. There will always be, even in the mind of a Buddhist monk or Christian nun, a growing desire to gain something else, no matter what it may be. This, I conclude, makes it impossible for anyone in the modern 21st Century to gain the status of ‘Buddha', or ‘The Enlightened, or Blissful One'.

Analysis Of Claude Levi Strauss s Black As Slacker...

Claude LÃ ©vi-Strauss was a French anthropologist who believed that the myths created and told by a society could be a window into the beliefs and conflicts of that society. As a Structuralist, LÃ ©vi-Strauss saw stories as language and sought to understand their underlying grammar. This he believed centered on pairs of opposite ideas, held by the culture, but creating tension within it — the raw and the cooked, the sacred and the profane, and so on. School of Rock, a 2003 film starring Jack Black as slacker Dewey Finn, shows the tension between a truly American pair of opposites: laziness vs. hard work. While in other mythologies it is a trickster character who mediates between these opposites, the nature of this American pair, and the surrounding culture, make it necessary that the trickster not remain so; he has to join one side or the other. Claude LÃ ©vi-Strauss sought a scientific approach to the interpretation of the meaning of myths. To perform an analysis, he would first collect every version and variant of a myth possible. Each version would be broken down into its individual plot elements, and these elements were then plotted on a chart to show how they fit together. The charts would be compared across variants, and eventually the true meaning of the myth would emerge. Any scientist knows that a large data pool is indispensable for getting good results. Unfortunately, there is only one School of Rock. Though I cannot be so thorough as he would have liked, the