Night and Black Boy Comparative Essay Elie Wiesel’s Night and Richard Wright’s Black Boy are memoirs based on their authors’ experiences with discrimination. They both take place during the 1940s, and though Night is set in Nazi-dominated Europe and Black Boy is set in the American South, many parallels can be drawn between Elie and Richard’s experiences. Elie and Richard both face extensive discrimination based on their race, but can do little to change their situations. As a result, they are forced to suppress their anger and placate their oppressors in order to survive. Nazi-dominated Europe and the American South were societies dripping with racism. Both had laws for the sole purpose of discriminating against and segregating certain groups of people. In Germany and the countries it controlled, there were the Nuremburg laws, which revoked Jews’ citizenship, prohibited them from marrying ethnic Germans, banned them from owning valuables, required them to wear yellow Stars of David, and forced them to move into ghettos with atrocious living conditions (Sources 1 and 2). In the American South, states implemented “Jim Crow” laws that banned interracial marriage or cohabitation between whites and blacks and segregated public areas such as schools, stores, and buses. Though on paper the segregated areas were “separate but equal”, in practice they were anything but equal (Jim Crow handout, class discussions). These laws had dramatically detrimental effects on the wellbeing of
Elie Wiesel’s book Night, tells what he went through and what was going on in the concentration camps. He was one of the few that made it out of the camps, and he suffered through all of the bad doings of Hitler and his men. This book gives many examples that show how Elie and the other Jews were dehumanized by being treated as something less than a human.
In Richard Wright’s novel, Black Boy, Richard is struggling to survive in a racist environment in the South. In his youth, Richard is vaguely aware of the differences between blacks and whites. He scarcely notices if a person is black or white, and views all people equally. As Richard grows older, he becomes more and more aware of how whites treat blacks, the social differences between the races, and how he is expected to act when in the presence of white people. Richard, with a rebellious nature, finds that he is torn between his need to be treated respectfully, with dignity and as an individual with value and his need to conform to the white rules of society for survival and acceptance.
Elie Wiesel’s book “Night” shows the life of a father and son going through the concentration camp of World War II. Their life long journey begins from when they are taken from their home in Sighet, they experience harsh and inhuman conditions in the camps. These conditions cause Elie and his father’s relationship to change. During their time there, Elie and his father experience a reversal in roles.
The novel Night by Elie Wiesel and the poem I,Too by Langston Hues discus topics that are very similar describe their point of views of their experiences, Elie’s was the holocaust and in the poem it was just racism .
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 “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
“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.” –Richard Wright, Black Boy. The author suffered and lived through an isolated society, where books were the only option for him to escape the reality of the world. Wright wrote this fictionalized book about his childhood and adulthood to portray the dark and cruel civilization and to illustrate the difficulties that blacks had, living in a world run by whites.
In 2006, Elie Wiesel published the memoir “Night,” which focuses on his terrifying experiences in the Nazi extermination camps during the World War ll. Elie, a sixteen-year-old Jewish boy, is projected as a dynamic character who experiences overpowering conflicts in his emotions. One of his greatest struggles is the sense helplessness that he feels when all the beliefs and rights, of an entire nation, are reduced to silence. Elie and the Jews are subjected daily to uninterrupted torture and dehumanization. During the time spent in the concentration camp, Elie is engulfed by an uninterrupted roar of pain and despair. Throughout this horrific experience, Elie’s soul perishes as he faces constant psychological abuse, inhuman living conditions, and brutal negation of his humanity.
In 1944-1945, Elie Wiesel was one of the few survivors to witness the lives during the Holocaust. He was only 15 years old to experience many brutal and harsh treatment between the Jews and the non-Jews. Growing up, Wiesel had faced many prejudice in the concentration camp as a prisoner by the Gestapos and other non-Jew workers. In 1960, Wiesel wanted to share his past experiences from the Holocaust by writing his memoir. In his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel discusses the theme of Racism. Through his use of atmosphere, tone, and foreshadowing, Wiesel is saying to reader that when one group deems themselves superior to another, they take the humanity away from the lesser groups.
Imaging living in the twentieth century, being jewish and being tormented every single day just because of your religion. Imagine being on the other side of the social injustice, growing up with your father who is a part of a group that is treating others wrong. In addition, imagine living on a reservation where you are treated horribly by the white people. In all of these situations, characters are treated horribly just because of who they are. In all of these books, many characters experience very harsh social injust in which their emotions are changed. Elie goes through many struggles throughout his whole life. Also, Bruno experiences an emotion change while learning more and more throughout the book. Next, Junior experiences many different emotion change through his entire life. In the historical fiction book The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne, and the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, and in the novel Night by Elie Wiesel characters
Racial hatred is prejudice and hostility targeting groups of color or ethnic backgrounds in various ways. “Night” by Elie Wiesel is a story about the author's experience during the Holocaust and how he survived through the harsh treatment of the concentration camps. Paul Rusesabagina’s “From An Ordinary Man” is about how the author saved many people from an ongoing tribe attack by putting them in his hotel. In Elie Wiesel’s “Night”and Paul Rusesabagina's “From An Ordinary Man”, both the author's use of overall purpose, theme, and use of rhetoric help tell the stories of survivors.
One of the main themes throughout the book is the title of the book “Night”. There are references from Eliezer about night during the book, which are full of symbolism. The word “night” is used repeatedly, and Eliezer recounts every dusk, night and dawn through the entire book. For instance, Night could be a metaphor for the Holocaust—submerge the family and thousands of Jewish families in the darkness and misery of the concentration camps.
Night by Elie Wiesel is an autobiography about his experience during the Holocaust when he was fifteen years old. Elie is fifteen when the tragedy begins. He is taken with his family through many trials and then is separated from everyone besides his father. They are left with only each other, of which they are able to confide in and look to for support. The story is told through a series of creative writing practices. Mr. Wiesel uses strong diction, and syntax as well as a combination of stylistic devices. This autobiography allows the readers to understand a personal, first-hand account of the terrible events of the holocaust. The ways that diction is used in Night helps with this understanding.
The early 1940s, an observant, young boy, and his caring father: the start of a story that would become known throughout the world of Eliezer Wiesel. His eye-opening story is one of millions born of the Holocaust. Elie’s identity, for which he is known by, is written out word for word his memoir, Night. Throughout his journey, Elie’s voice drifts from that of an innocent teen intrigued with the teachings of his religion to that of a soul blackened by a theoretical evil consuming the Nazis and Hitler’s Germany. Elie Wiesel's memoir, Night, examines the theme of identity through the continuous motifs of losing one’s self in the face of death and fear, labeling innocent people for a single dimension of what defines a human being, and the oppression seen in the Holocaust based on the identities of those specifically targeted and persecuted.
Cruelty surrounds the world constantly, and is used frequently in works of literature to reveal certain things about the theme. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, acts of cruelty are used to express the theme and enhance its message. One of the largest themes revealed by these acts is “man’s inhumanity to man,” which includes mistreatment of Jews by the Nazis, the common people, and other Jews. Watching the large amounts of violence, abuse, and discrimination that occur in this memoir show us the horrors of the Holocaust and how it transformed the men and women who it experienced it, as well as those who caused it.
To begin with, both novels show very strong themes of prejudice throughout. Night begins with the Elie Wiesel’s account of what it was like to live through Hitler’s final solution to rid Europe of the Jewish population. He remembers what it was like to be a young man living in Sighet, Transylvania when the Nazis moved in, and forced him out of his home to concentration camps where many people were killed in the crematoria upon arrival. Throughout Wiesel’s time in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he had been separated from his mother and sisters, watched his friends die, and lived everyday in fear of death. The prisoners of these concentrations camps were stripped of their identity by only being referred to as their tattooed number, they were