Sunday, November 28, 2010

Night and Literary Quality

Night is an incredible book that recounts a tale from the Holocaust. Making this a personal account rather than a historical one adds more depth that no History book could do. When you read a book from history, you tend to look at it from the outside in. Also, since it’s from History we think it’s from a long time ago. People forget that the Holocaust was a recent event and some of those people in the Holocaust are still alive today. We become disconnected to the horrors these people faced in the concentration camps.
The personal account puts the reader inside the bubble. It allows the readers to be able to relate to the characters in the story. It hits the readers not only on a mental level, but on an emotional level as well. It’s history, but it’s not. It’s a story, which could be our story.
There are literary qualities to this memoir: scope and intent and larger truth. Night covers a particular period in Wiesel’s life. It addresses the challenges he had during the Holocaust, mainly surviving. The result of it becomes the larger truth- losing hope, faith, and humanity during a horrific time in one’s life. Millions of people have went through the Holocaust, and millions more couldn’t fathom of what atrocities these people went through, however we can still relate. Our struggles aren’t as bad, but we still experience events that put us down-that make us wonder why bad things happen to us. We aren’t stealing bread crumbs from the dead, but we do curl up in bed hoping tomorrow will be better.
What Weisel did took a lot of guts. Writing something about your past is hard, writing something about your past that you want to forget is almost impossible. I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t even know if I have any difficult struggles to write about. I lived a pretty happy life compare to Wiesel’s so far. I’m sure I can write about my struggles of being poor, being Asian, or living in the shadows of my older successful brother, but that’s just life.  If I had to write about it, I would try to add humor to it, kind of like what Karr did for The Liar’s Club. I don’t like writing about gloomy events. I try to learn from them as much as I can, and when I do I try and forget about it.

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