- LIT 4303
Dr. Lillios
________________________________________________________________________
Elie Wiesel’s NIGHT
Reading Assignment: Read the book by Thursday, January 27
Schedule:
Thursday, January 27: Discussion of character, setting, and world view. Concentration camp tour of Dachau.
Tuesday, February 1: Continue discussion of spirituality in the novel.
Submit journal entry to http://www.lit4303.blogspot.com (see below) by midnight. Be sure to sign your entry.
Discuss language and silence in the novel.
Thursday, February 3: Discuss blog entries in class (be sure to bring a hard copy of your own entry to class.
Wiesel’s world view in the novel
His message/warning to the world
Journal Assignment:
Read selection from “Behavior in Extreme Situations: Coercion” by Bruno Bettelheim.
In this excerpt, Bettelheim defines what it is that makes a human, human. Discuss his definition and how it applies to the characters in Wiesel’s NIGHT. Do any of them find an area of freedom or purpose in the camps?
Bettelheim also contrasts the human being with the non-human being (the muselmanner), particularly as he shows how Wiesel’s father deteriorates at the end of the novel. How does the son handle this situation? How will he regard his future identity after his father’s death?
Compare/contrast Wiesel’s “hero” with Grass’s.
Write about a page or 200-250 words and then post to blogspot. Please try to read the entries of the other students in class before Thursday. You can post a comment on their entries, if you wish.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Assignment 2
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Bettelheim asserts in his essay “Behavior in Extreme Situations: Coercion,” that “what happened in the concentration camp suggests that under conditions of extreme deprivation, the influence of the environment over the individual can become total” (395). The persistence of the environments found in both Auschwitz and Buchenwald had an extreme effect on young Wiesel. The unpredictability of the concentration camps directly correlates to the capricious nature of the self, or, what must one do in order to survive? This is a question, in Wiesel’s case, that he can never fully answer. The human instinct of survivability let alone being able to cope with drastic changes in condition is what keeps the character, the hero, going. Wiesel and the rest of the Jews seek freedom and purpose, but are left deflated vessels, void of understanding what is really left, and further being unable to render what it is that will motivate them to propel forward. The deterioration that happens to Wiesel after his father’s death and his newly attained freedom ultimately makes him a muselmanner, the corpse of his former self. Wiesel is unable to remember his old life “from the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me” (Wiesel 115), and at the same time is constantly being reminded of the horrors of the camps and the loss of his family. The physical and emotional decline of Wiesel’s father correlates with his own loss of purpose and self, and it is in this way that we begin to fully grasp the everlasting effects of Nazi takeover.
ReplyDeleteWiesel’s “Night” showcases several instances where the mere attitude of the prisoner was the basis of survival in the camp. One poignant moment was the woman in the train who said she could see fire. It is unknown whether she lives or not, but she may well have passed while her very own people were beating her to be quiet. It is apparent that she was resigned to her fate at the end after having been beaten so often, and no longer cried out. The other prisoners on the train at the time were still with an attitude of astonishment and disbelief as to the situation they were in.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to Wiesel’s father, after he had gotten beat by the guard moments before his death, he was as someone who could not feel anything, like the moslems that Bettelheim describes. However, I was wondering where Wiesel’s “point of no return” fell, for he did not go to his father’s side while his father was dying. He showed remorse for this, knowing that this would be something that would affect him all his life, but did it affect him to the point where he would survive “not with a lowered self-respect, but without any” (Bettelheim)? Wiesel couldn’t comprehend people behaving the way the son did when his father was abandoned as the son ran along ahead, but he later wonders if he would do the same, to where he compares himself to the son when he does not go to his father’s side. Wiesel’s insistence that his father remain alive may well have kept his father alive as long as he was, and also have given Wiesel incentive for his own survival, though there were times when he was plagued with the thought of being freed from his father.
Lisbeny Duran
After reading Bruno Bettleheim’s article from “Behavior in Extreme Situations: Coercion,” I feel that I can better understand Elie Wiesel’s intentions in displaying instances of self-evaluation in Night, rather than just the concrete mistreatment he experienced as a concentration camp victim. The gruesome and inhumane acts that took place during the Holocaust are most definitely reflected in Wiesel’s book, but he also ventures into portraying the method of survival that a victim needed to take in order to come out alive. One scene that comes to mind to illustrate this point is when Eliezer is forced to watch his father get beaten by an SS officer. Rather than simply describing the pain it caused both father and son, Wiesel expresses Eliezer’s internal reactions, or lack thereof: “I watched the whole scene without moving” or speaking, focusing more on “how to get farther away so that I would not be hit” (Wiesel 52). That is, Eliezer becomes more concerned for his own safety and, as a survival tactic, removes himself from the situation to the point where he grows angry with his father for feeling pain. In respect to Bettleheim’s argument, Wiesel is thus demonstrating the need for a prisoner “to actively pretend not to observe, not to know what the SS required one not to know” (Bettleheim 400). Whether intentionally or subconsciously, Eliezer removes himself from the factual situation that his father is being violently abused and that there is little he can do about it. He reaches the point where he still lives for his father, recognizing the unjust treatment that the elder receives, yet, he chooses not to do anything about it. Alternatively, he trains his mind to feel anger toward his father’s weakness as a means of survival; hardening himself to the brutality. As Bettleheim suggests, a combination of ignorance and awareness is what one needed to overcome the mind control of the SS. Wiesel is sure to reflect this concept in this section of Night, amongst other points in the book.
ReplyDelete~Charlotte Warren
Bruno Bettelheim's definition of the human being as that person which possess "the two freedoms of activity and passivity," and are allowed "intake and elimination, mental activity and rest," make up those members of the concentration-camp-bound whom are still considered human. He posits that these faculties of free will "much more than the utility of any one such activity, was what enabled me and others like me to survive." This definition is directly applicable to Wiesel's self in NIGHT. After seeing his mother and sisters condemned to death in the furnace, Wiesel charges himself with the safety and survival of his father. This drive to save his father compels him to maintain himself as well, as he believes his father's survival is contingent upon his own survival. This choice, manifest in many smaller choices - such as choosing to give his father his rations for the day - fulfills Wiesel's need for personal choice, as defined by Bettelheim, thus giving Wiesel a reason to live. Bettelheim observes that those whom became sub-human... the "muselmanner..." lost that will to live as a direct result of losing their capacity for free will, for choice. In allowing themselves to take every order from the SS without even a hint of inner turmoil or questioning, they irrevocably committed themselves to death, knowingly or not.
ReplyDeleteAs Wiesel's father slips further and further from "humanity" and into the ranks of the "muselmanner," so too does his will to live. With the collapse of his will to live comes the coupled deterioration of his health. Wiesel's father made the mistake of neglecting to find some target for his human ability to choose, and so survived only as long as Wiesel's efforts to save him were viable. The further tragedy of his father's death, aside from the immediate grief of losing his father and only remaining family member, lies in that Wiesel himself loses his reason to exist. His entire paradigm in the camps was defined by his choice to protect his father. After his father's death, he must find some new paradigm, however insignificant, with which to build his identity on. This new reason to live is manifest in Wiesel's commitment to carrying on his father's legacy and his unending desire to bear witness to the world that which he has seen in the camps. This drive delivers him from death in the camps, and after his liberation, it remains the onus of his literary focus.
Bettelheim describes that “The two freedoms, of activity and passivity, constitute our two most basic human attitudes” (396). Without these freedoms, he concludes, it is impossible to survive in such extreme conditions as in the concentration camps. For Bettelheim, once a human decides to stop thinking, observing, and feeling, they succumb to death very quickly and he goes on to say that “Those prisoners who blocked out neither heart nor reason, neither feelings nor perception, but kept informed of their inner attitudes even when they could hardly ever afford to act on them, those prisoners survived and came to understand the conditions they lived under”(403). With regards to Elie Wiesel’s Night, it would seem that Eliezer’s relationship with his father keeps him in this state of feeling, and allows him to formulate some kind of response to the horror that is happening around him. In observing his father, Eliezer maintains a focus on the harsh reality of his situation and as Bettelheim points out, “Not observing where it counts most, not knowing where one wants so much to know, all this is most destructive to the functioning of one’s personality”(401). As his father begins to deteriorate, Eliezer watches him closely, and in one particular section of the novel he describes his father’s physical appearance: “How he had aged since last night! His body was completely twisted, shriveled up into himself. His eyes were glazed over, his lips parched, decayed. Everything about him expressed total exhaustion”(Wiesel 88). The relationship with his father is a fundamental aspect of the novel, and could be seen as the area of purpose that keeps Eliezer alive til the very end.
ReplyDeleteI noticed not so much the "silence" in Night but the lack of extensive language. The sparse wording, i feel only emphasized the terror of certain situations. I thought it was interesting what a classmate brought up in class, about the two contrasting views about survival from Wiesel and Bettelheim. Wiesel is always on the verge of letting go of life, losing humanity painstakingly; slowly. on the other hand Bettelheim chooses to emphasize the need to hold on t humanity in order to survive. Though these things are true, Wiesel still emerges with a vigor to inspire humanity to remember and take action in preventing and fighting human persecution everywhere.
ReplyDeleteI think as far as the difference between Wiesel's hero and Grass's hero is obviously not only age but circumstance. Grass's story was fictional and had a surrealistic beauty and playfulness about the people/characters in the story even making the Nazis humorous (finding humor at their expense). For Night, the story is memoir, the characters rough and rigid in fact, the lack of beauty and humor and lightness is what is so striking; the lack of humanity. Because the Tin Drum was fiction, Oskar could play with the Nazis and their marching rhythm, but in Night the penalties for not falling in line during the March caused Wiesel's father much ridicule and physical abuse. I find these two novels, though touching on the same horror, to be on two total different end on the spectrum in terms of style and delivery. Simply one was real and brutally raw whereas the other is lighthearted but still holds complex and thought-provoking themes.
-Sydni Gonzalez
Life for the prisoners in the concentration camps was a daily battle. They fought their fellow prisoners, the SS men, and most begrudgingly, themselves. In order to truly survive not only did they have to avoid the physical brutalities of violence and hunger, but they also had to avoid what Bettelheim refers to as the “point of no return.” This he described as “The point beyond which one would never, under any circumstances, give in to the oppressor, even if it meant risking and losing one’s life.” Many prisoners became so numb to their situation they, in a sense, stopped living.
ReplyDeleteProtecting his father allowed Eliezer to avoid reaching the “point of no return.” Eliezer lived for his father. The two shared rations and looked out for each other. As he began to see his father’s condition deteriorate, Eliezer begins toward reaching his breaking point. Slowly, he becomes less concerned with his father and focuses on his own survival. Finally, his own dedication to survive outweighs his devotion to continuing to care for his father. However, it wasn’t until after his father passed away that Eliezer’s life fully loses all meaning. Although he survived, he has lost his self-respect and his soul. He becomes a walking corpse, still human but completely inept of human emotions and mentality which will plague him for generation to come.
Lauren Supersano
I believe that for most of the novel Wiesel is not the moslem that Bettelheim describes. Wiesel still desires food, still speaks to his father, and still has the desire to live. Even during the death march Wiesel swore to himself and God that he would not abandon his father even though a small part of him knew he'd be better off without him. It's when Wiesel's father is in the last stages of his life, when he's calling for his son, that Wiesel loses a bit of himself. He stays silent while his father is beaten and eventually taken away. This silence is a defining moment for young Wiesel. His father, the one person he was living for, is now gone. A bit of Wiesel's humanity is gone, along with a bit of his desire to live. Bettelheim says that the SS were more interested in the threat of punishment and what it did to destroy self-determination. The SS wanted to destroy the prisoner's minds and will to live before they destroyed their bodies. Before his father's death, Wiesel took a beating from the guards and still his will to live was very strong. He led his father through the death march. He cared for his father all that he could. Wiesel's father's death destroyed Wiesel's will to live, and the SS were happier for it.
ReplyDeleteElliot Northlake
I think that this piece provides a possible explanation for Wiesel’s seemingly callous attitude toward his father later on in the story, but not by way of some breakdown in his own humanity. Rather, it could be an indicator of the breakdown of humanity he perceived in his father. In the camps, the prisoners could tell from experience, after a while anyway, how the experience was taking its toll on each other just by seeing them, by watching their physical state and their general demeanor, the way they carried themselves. They learned to detect the fundamental lack of will to live that Bettelheim describes. Wishing death for one of the “living dead” was a plea for mercy, or something even deeper than that. These people were less like the dying and more like the undead. They were restless corpses who weren’t waiting for death but already in its grip. That they were still animated by what little will they held on to felt unnatural. In a situation this bleak, other prisoners watching them would see them as already dead, kept standing by some kind of oversight, as though Death was just too busy to claim his own. Eli seeing his father carrying on in this state was less akin to watching a suffering loved one slowly slip away and more as if he had to watch his dead father rise from the grave after death and walk the earth in pain, longing to be at peace again. When his father did pass, it wouldn’t be the death of a living person but a proper burial for his already lifeless body.
ReplyDeleteDamn this is depressing.
- Robbi Ramirez
The most interesting aspect of the novel Night, as well as this article is the contrast between the human and the non-human being. The Jews within these camps were being constantly bombarded with the idea that they were losing their identity, being completely stripped of what they used to know to be true, and the values that they held to be true within their hearts and minds. Wiesel’s father towards the end of the novel begins to deteriorate, becoming a non-human being within the novel, and also causing Wiesel to question his own integrity and morality as a human being.
ReplyDeleteWiesel isn’t quite sure how to handle this situation because he has, of course, never been put in this sort of situation before. He becomes unsure of how to deal with his father, and towards the end he even has thoughts of wishing that his father would just die already, so that he can continue to worry about himself and his own survival. I strongly believe that people don’t know how they would handle a situation until it happens to them, and in being a firm believer of this, I think that people who see Wiesel as being cold hearted for having these thoughts are just a little ridiculous. If I were put in a life or death situation, and my survival depended on someone else dying, I know that even though it is wrong to think, I would wish death upon that person, because I couldn’t struggle with my own survival, as well as theirs.
I think that Wiesel's identity after his father dies however is lost. He isn’t sure what to think anymore and he has no idea who he is anymore, because he once had his father to guide him, but now he has nothing to guide him, struggling for survival on his own when he at least had his father to depend on. Wiesel in a sense lost his identity after his father died, but now he has the opportunity to shape and form his own identity, which he did.
Lauren Slygh
In reading Bettelheim’s account of what makes one retain humanity during extreme situations, the first thing that came to mind was the Warsaw uprising. Contrary to what one would think, the prisoners who took part in the Warsaw uprising had an overall higher survival rate than those who did not. It seems that Bettelheim is right in his insistence that in order to stay alive under extreme oppression, one must hold on to at least one shred of independence, or control over one’s own life. Whether it be taking time to sit in silence each day or, on the most basic level, recognizing one’s ability for freedom of thought and feeling, part of staying human requires holding on to some aspect of autonomy. In this light, it seems that the participants in the Warsaw uprising had a higher survival rate because they decided that they could, and would, do something about their condition. Risking death, they chose to exercise their ability to act as humans rather than simply allowing themselves to become degraded into objects under SS control. In Wiesel’s Night, we see him fluctuated between giving up caring at all and holding onto the last shred of existence. For instance, his inability to feel much sorrow after witnessing the first hangings is characteristic of the “moslems” that Bettelheim describes. It seems that through it all, Elie’s concern for his father is what keeps him alive. Elie holds on to his humanity by caring for someone else, and it is this basic human emotion that may have gotten him out of the concentration camp alive.
ReplyDelete-Sam Krop
Bettleheim and Wiesel have contrasting views they use to explain their survival. Bettleheim begins his rationale by explaining the statistics behind death in the concentration camp saying that some “simply died of exhaustion, both physical and psychological, due to a loss of desire to live(394).” He believes that the unpredictable schedule of the concentration camps became another type of punishment. This erratic system is why Bettleheim suggests the need to maintain humanity via “freedom of action and freedom of thought (396).” By prioritizing these ideas “however insignificant,” Bettleheim argues that these are the only reasons that prevent becoming a muselmannerr (396). In contrast, the walking dead is what Wiesel seems to argue kept him alive. In Night, Wiesel’s journey suggests that his survival was based on “every man for himself, and you cannot think of others…each of us lives and dies alone (110).” Bettleheim and Wiesel’s conflicting views share a common theme on humanity—it’s unpredictability.
ReplyDelete--SaraBeth Vanemon
Bettelheim’s essay brings to light the severity of the human condition under the control of the Nazi regime. Bettelheim strongly believes that the preservation of one’s humanity and self was crucial in surviving the anguish of the concentration camps. In order to keep one’s self intact, it was essential to maintain the two freedoms Bettelheim labeled as activity and passivity, or as he puts it, “our two most basic human attitudes.” The main goal of the Nazis and the SS officers was to dehumanize the Jewish prisoners and force them to act not out of will or a desire to live, but out of an autonomous, inhuman thought process. Bettelheim believes that once a human was stripped out of these desires, death was nearly certain.
ReplyDeleteThis is reflected in Wiesel’s novel through his desire to stick by and protect his father. When the two first arrive at Birkenau, it is their connection and will to remain alive that fueled their actions. However, as their conditions worsened and their health deteriorated it became difficult to act on emotion, anger or will, bringing the two closer and closer to becoming muselmanner. As Bettelheim describes it, their environment was becoming their sole motivating factor, stripping Wiesel and his father of the basic human instincts and desires that would normally fuel them. Wiesel at one point wishes that his father were no longer alive so that he could focus solely on saving his own life. Whether or not Bettelheim would approve of this decision is unclear. Although Wiesel’s desire to rid himself of his father is immoral and inhumane, it shows that he still had the will to go forward and not succumb to his environment as the SS officers aimed to do.
Ultimately, Wiesel himself identified himself as one of the walking corpses as he gazed upon himself in the mirror. Upon witnessing the loss of his father, Wiesel’s final shred of humanity and desire was stripped from him. Had he not been rescued shortly after that, he may not have lasted much longer. Without anything to remind him of his human desires and will he would have surely perished. Wiesel’s account reveals how the cruel injustices of the Nazi regime can succeed in driving a human into complete and utter despair despite constant and extremely powerful attempts to cling onto the final vestiges of what it is to be human.
-Wilson De Gouveia
According to Bettelheim’s essay, the transition to find a purpose in the concentration camp – not that there were many option to choose from – was the most arduous path people had to endure, and one that always came down to two simple answers as he mentions: “Make up your mind: do you want to live or do you want to die?” Once people made the decision to accept life, then that path would be divided into two other groups, whether you wanted to become a “moslem” or just a “prisoner”. In Bettelheim’s essay, the author interestingly reveals how to survive the concentration camp and all the paradoxes that come with making the decision to live. In the end, whatever the decision is, people are never going to be happy.
ReplyDeleteBettelheim’s theories of survival can definitely be seen in Wiesel’s Night, obviously because most of the book takes place in a concentration camp. In several cases, some characters’ decisions in the novel become the epitome of what Bettelheim mentions in his essay. For example, Eliezer’s actions of maintaining control of his environment (keeping the spoon, shoes, and most importantly the ability to influence his life) enable him to follow orders and make the Nazis happy; hence he survives. Bettelheim would perhaps say that Eliezer was a prisoner who was well informed of his “inner attitudes and came to understand the condition he lived under” – and that’s why he survived. On page 45 in Night, Wiesel describes the perfect scenario to become a walking dead. And like Bettelheim says, “Those don’t last too long.” Stein, the relative from Antwerp, as he says it himself, only lives knowing that his family is still alive, but when he is given the “real news,” he ceases to exist. The walking corpses, perfectly described by Bettelheim, are a sad case of humanity in the war. They stop acting on their own thus giving up on life and becoming shadows of death. Unfortunately, those who died in the camps, like Stein, most likely had to become Muselmanners at some point.
~ Salo Steinvortz
A particular passage that interested me in Bettelheim’s text speaks about one’s needing to make decision about living or dying, and engaging in some form of individual, intellectual thought. Elie commits small acts of defiance throughout the book that pave his way to survival and salvation. He refuses to give his golden tooth to the dentist, but remains clever and diplomatic to avoid getting in trouble. He observes sons betraying their fathers and, though with difficulty, manages to hold on to his humanity and takes care of his father until he passes. He stops to enjoy music at the one moment in the novel when beauty overcomes the horrific silence of the concentration camp. Keep eating, the political prisoner advised Bettelheim. Keep eating and keep your body functioning properly, but above all, find room to think. In midst of the effectively de-humanizing Nazi machine, the only way to remain a person was to keep one’s spirit within one’s body. The process was simple – work the body and deny the being beyond the body. Take away hair, clothing, possessions, and drive the machine to the brink. When the machine breaks, burn it and replace it with another. Elie survived the process because he never became that machine. He retains some level of freedom which I suspect allowed Wiesel to continue living on after his experiences . In a novel that reveals terrifying implications about human nature, this is the only beacon of hope – that despite best efforts, despite the mandate the German people gave to SS to commit these acts, some victims did not break completely. One must decide to live or die, the political prisoner suggested – and it’s somewhat comforting to know that in the face of such evil, we can still choose life.
ReplyDeleteJaroslav Kalfar
In his essay, “From ‘Behavior in Extreme Situations: Coercion,’” Bettleheim portrays the tragedy of the “muselmanners” or “walking corpses,” which is intricately connected to Wiesel’s father’s downward spiral into death (Bettleheim 398). The human mind is a vulnerable, yet powerful source of energy, especially when survival is a journey very much dependent on its functioning and perception. Bettleheim explains that these individuals, the “muselmanners,” had relinquished all power and control over themselves and their environment to their tyrannical oppressors (Bettleheim 398). This surrendering of emotion, of purpose, of faith, and a desire to live eventually poisons Wiesel’s father’s mind and solidifies his mental and physical destruction (Wiesel 105).
ReplyDeleteAccording to Bettleheim, “[Muselmanners] [gave] up responding at all” to their environment and “they behaved as if they were not thinking, not feeling, unable to act or respond, moved only by things outside of themselves” (Bettleheim 399). This sense of impending doom and the personification of death, itself, spread like a plague among the concentration camp. Those committed to survival detached themselves from the “muselmanners” as a means of self-preservation (Bettleheim 399). Bettleheim’s argument rings true for Wiesel and his separation from his father’s vulnerability. Wiesel’s description of his father’s health mirrors Bettleheim’s recalling of the “walking corpses” (Bettleheim 398). Wiesel explains, “He had become childlike: weak, frightened, vulnerable…I knew that I was no longer arguing with him but with Death… with Death that he had already chosen” (Wiesel 105). Appalled at his father’s weakness and deterioration, Wiesel questioned how much time to spend with his father, how much food to share with him, and how much protection to offer him. Even the night of his father’s death, Wiesel prioritizes his own life over comforting his father in his last moments. Wiesel tragically admits, “I remained flat on my back, asking God to make my father stop calling my name, to make him stop crying. So afraid was I to incur the wrath of the SS” (Wiesel xi). Wiesel’s father symbolically represents Wiesel’s connection to the outside world and to the true essence of humanity, thus when Wiesel loses his father, the bonds to his environment are severed. Despite his detachment to the outside world, Wiesel survives and defies death itself.
Kerri Libra
I don’t completely think Bettelheim’s definition of being human was taken by Wiesel in the same direction. As it seems, there is an optimism to Bettelheim compared to Wiesel’s realist perspective on how a human being is being human--changing to basics and shedding off what is the mundane.
ReplyDeleteRationally speaking and considering of the oppressor, the purpose in the camps is to do what you are told and it will lead to freedom, not to the crematoriums. They share the idea that in the camps, your purpose is to live everyday to gain the next.
I find myself at a pause, Wiesel’s father falls apart and he handled as well as he could. I cannot fathom how I would deal with the situation. My father is different from Wiesel’s. Bullheaded and more battle-strong. He wouldn’t fall apart in that, he would’ve fought until he died. I find Eliezer’s feelings of doubt are apart of the tryings and reality. Self-preservation will take hold inevitably. The denial can only last so long. The hardship, the heart sinking feeling is the fact his father gave up with only months before D-day. Caring for his father for the time he did was though a part of keeping hope alive and pulling on the last strings of denial before they break.
Eliezer’s future still had hope, self-preservation took front and center after his father’s death. This took him to the end and even in the darkness, a splinter of light can shed light bring hope.
Eliezer and Oskar are both anti-heroes. But I rather not use the word “hero” at all for they did not save anyone. Their stories were life stories. An autobiography and a faux-autobiography. I do think the difference between them are far greater. Eliezer is in the Holocaust, the worst parts he lived through, growing to a young man, learning to become something (not better, not worse) transformed. While Oskar is a rebel not growing up, not learning much, with the rise of the Party. They are at opposite side of the spectrum. Eliezer changes as he goes through the moments of live, not like Oskar. Oskar is stubborn and so selfish.
Ian
End of transmission.
There is an extreme difference between Grass’s narcissistic, paranoid, scatter-brained “hero” and the calm, detached, disposed style of Wiesel’s “hero” characterization. Wiesel’s hero is internal, silently protesting in the depths of his heart while succumbing to the events around him; whereas Grass’s hero is loud, outspoken, disruptive, and chaotic. However, they are both outsiders in their own way. Where Oskar chooses to reject society’s conventions, disregarding the norms, standards, and expectations of his Polish culture, Wiesel is an outsider only because of being forced in the situation. Wiesel, as a young boy is ready to accept the destiny and culture of his people – ready to study the religion and philosophy involved in his peoples’ history. Wiesel’s destiny is interrupted by the tragic events of the world – a situation no one would choose. Oskar, on the other hand, has rejected the destiny offered to him by his father (as a grocer) and forces his world (parents, neighbors, “friends”) to accommodate his chosen lifestyle, fate, and communication tactics. Oskar pushes his needs on others in a selfishly unheroic way while Wiesel represses his needs, wants, and desires internally; silent and stoic he forces himself forward toward and in support of his father, being a hero for him in a time of need. Where any of Oskar’s downfalls, tragedies, or circumstances are the result of his own personality, dysfunction and personal choices, Wiesel’s tragedies are no results of his own making. Wiesel’s heroic self-preservation is in direct opposition to Oskar’s anti-heroic self-destructive acts.
ReplyDeleteI think that it is clear to see that Wiesel does not allow himself to become, what Bettelheim describes as a walking corpse or a “moslem”. Although there are times when Wiesel struggles to maintain his own humanity he is able to keep a sense of self even through all of his experiences. In contrast, Wiesel’s father, near the end of the novel, “came to feel that their environment was one over which they could exercise no influence whatsoever” (Bettelheim) this becoming a moslem. Analyzing Wiesel’s situation by comparing the interaction between a moslem and a non-moslem The best example of the Wiesel’s struggle with his father is the night of his father’s death. Wiesel’s father cries out to his son but as he does so the SS guards begin to beat him because of his insolence but through all of this Wiesel states “I didn’t move…I was afraid, my body was afraid of another blow, this time to my head…” (Wiesel 111). Even though Wiesel cares deeply about his father and silently wishes for him to bite his tongue, the reader can see the slight detachment and the fact that Wiesel is starting to fend more for himself rather than for himself and his father. After his father’s death, Wiesel states “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep…if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble consciences, I might have found something like: Free at last!...”(Wiesel 112). To me this is a shining example of Bettelheim’s discussion of moslems and non-moslems. Wiesel, although would be pained to accept it, through his father’s death was freed from the burdens of looking out for anyone other than himself for the rest of the war. I do not think that being a moslem had any effect on how Wiesel regarded his father after his death but that it only made it more difficult for Wiesel to accept the fate that had occurred.
ReplyDeleteShelby Thorne
"There are those who tell me I survived in order to write this text. I am not convinced. I don’t know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself. A miracle? Certainly not . . . it was nothing more than chance" (Wiesel viii).
ReplyDeleteAt face value, those introductory words written the preface to Night by Wiesel seemingly contrast with Bettelheim's theory in "Behavior in Extreme Situations: Coercion."
Bettelheim postulates, "But when they no longer reached out for [food] spontaneously, no longer responded with thanks, an effort to smile, or a look at the giver, they were nearly always beyond help. Later they took food, sometimes ate it, sometimes not, but no longer had a feeling response. In the last, just before terminal stage, they no longer ate it" (Bettleheim 402).
Eliezer's father follows true to Bettelheim's theory, succumbing to death before departing. "I ran to get some soup and brought it to my father. But he did not want it. All he wanted was water" (Wiesel 111). Yet, why, if as Wiesel believes he did nothing to save himself, did he live? After the death of his Eliezer's father, the text states, "I shall not describe my life after that period. It no longer mattered. Since my father's death, nothing mattered to me anymore" (Wiesel 113). Surely, Bettelheim would have categorized Eliezer as a muselmanner, a walking corpse, one who has lost all will to live. Bettelheim states, "Prisoners entered the moslem stage when emotion could no longer be evoked in them" (Bettelheim 401). On the one hand, it would seem Eliezer has resigned himself to death, "I spent my days in total idleness…" on the other, he has "only one desire: to eat" (Wiesel 113). It seems, perhaps, without even realizing it Eliezer made a decision to live. "Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. That's all we thought about. No thought of revenge, or of parents. Only bread" (Wiesel 115). Dreams of soup and desire for bread became his passion; they his death escape, they became life.
Cassie Turner
Bettelheim stresses the importance of maintaining basic human will; that which we decide for ourselves which would probably mean our concept of choice. In the battle against the unpredictable environment and deadly oppression, Bettelheim discovers, much to the help of a fellow prisoner, that in order to survive you have to satisfy psychological and physiological needs. He writes of “two freedoms, of activity and passivity, [that] constitute our two basic human attitudes, while intake and elimination [food and bodily functions], mental activity [choices] and rest, make up or physiological activities.
ReplyDeleteFor the characters in Night, the de-humanization process began before the journey to the concentration camps. It began by discriminating Jews, sectioning them off into Ghettos, taking away their possessions, taking away their rights, taking away their citizenship until they became unrecognizable to the state. They became objects, probably even property. Once they do not have agency, they do not have recognition. And that is not a safe place to be in. Then begins the Holocaust. It was a systematic break down of their basic human rights that shut them off and “coercion” in that environment broke down men even more. Elie does have a purpose, or formulates a purpose he thinks he should have as he obeys his father and even becomes his guardian at times in the novel.
In terms of political science, there is concept called the “three faces of power” that distinguish how humans act in accordance to government (or a ruling body). The first is brute force. This is seen first as Bettelheim accounts the treatment of prisoners in the concentration camps and the inability for them to defend themselves against the power and threat of the SS executions. The second is agenda setting which coincides directly with Bettelheim as he states…
“By destroying man’s ability to act on his own or to predict the outcome of his actions, they destroyed the feeling that his action had any purpose, so many prisoners stopped acting. But when the stopped acting they stopped living” (Bettelheim, 396).
This is generally laws and legislatures that man abides by because it is how government dispenses power. Bettelheim describes the coercion present in the concentration camps. Third and finally, is normalization. This occurs when humans do things without thinking to do it, when it becomes an aspect of daily life, involuntarily. This would be the Muselmaner or the Walking Corpses. They stopped acting of their own free will and choices. This is the most radical example of power and coercion as tools. Wiesel’s future identity after coming through the Holocaust, facing execution, being subject to those faces of power created such a pit, a hole in his psyche that as he looks in the mirror all he sees is a dead corpse staring back at him. That coercion does not leave so easily.
Joseph Ragoonanan
In Night, Elie Wiesel does not make a strong case for areas of freedom or purpose for life in the concentration camps. In fact, the main character Eliezer shows very little humanity or sense of purpose in the novel but instead comes to focus on food primarily: “From time to time, I would dream. But only about soup, an extra ration of soup” (Wiesel 113). Wiesel’s portrayal of Eliezer’s desire for food in camp life is striking similar to another account of life in work camps under an authoritarian rule—Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Ivan, like Eliezer, has a strong connection to his soup rations during his time in a work camp. But, although both books show a connection between a prisoner and food, Wiesel does not make the case that Solzhenitsyn seemingly does.
ReplyDeleteSolzhenitsyn, in his discussion of Ivan’s preoccupation with food, suggests that the Russian prisoner finds the limits of an authoritarian system through his pursuit of more food. Ivan finds ways to get more food than he is rationed, and Solzhenitsyn explicitly explains Ivan’s approach, his food habits, and his thinking about food. Wiesel does not expand on Eliezer’s connection to his dreamed of soup. Soup is an important thing, but it is not an aspect of camp life that Eliezer can find freedom or purpose in. It just exists as a symbol of his oppression.
Ivan displays much greater freedom through his food. Solzhenitsyn describes how Ivan always saves a crust of bread in order to slowly sop up his remaining portion of oatmeal. Food becomes one of the very few things Ivan can have control over. That is not the case for Eliezer. He is described as eating as quickly as possible—slurping his soup down. He does not portray the same meticulousness that Ivan displays towards his food. And unlike Ivan, Eliezer is unable to control his enjoyment of his food. One day “the soup tasted better than ever” and the next it “tasted of corpses” all based on the dictates of what the camp guards expose the prisoners to (63, 65). Eliezer cannot control his enjoyment of his food where Ivan can.
Eliezer’s connection to food in comparison to Ivan’s shows a lack of freedom or purpose within the prisoner’s power to control. It is not an aspect of freedom because it is always tied to his guard oppressors. Wiesel makes a case, with his discussion of food, that the area of personal freedom within a concentration camp was extremely limited.
Kyle Kretzer
Bettelheim’s article establishes very interesting concepts of identity which can be interpreted through a Structuralist lens of analysis, with a special focus on the idea of binaries. The author discusses the elements of being a human and contrasts them to the “muselmanner,” therefore because we know what constitutes a human (according to Bettelheim’s definition) we understand what isn’t “human.” If Bettelheim states that “It was the giving up of all feelings, all inner reservations about one’s actions, the letting go of a point at which one would hold fast no matter what, the changed prisoner into moslem,” then persisting on the opposite guarantees one’s hold on their own “humanity.” Moreover, Bettelheim describes incidents in the work camps “when other prisoners recognized what was happening and separated themselves from these now ‘marked’ men,” which further implies this idea of identifying the moslems vs. non-moslems simply by knowing that what isn’t a moslem is a non-moslem. This leads us to the question of how will Elie regard his own identity after his father’s death, and how this binary comes to play in this question. If Elie and his father represent the two opposite ends of this binary, can it be assumed that his father’s death perhaps distracts the established identities? If Elie relies on his father’s role of a moslem to establish his personal non-moslem identity then it will perturb his future view of himself.
ReplyDeleteOf course this isn’t a traditional (and perhaps compatible) manner of thinking about Bettelheim’s article and Weisel’s NIGHT, but I wanted to give it a shot!
-Taissa Rebroff
This article doesn't too say much about silence or language, but it did touch basis on life for the prisoners in the concentration camps. The prisoners had to get used to being apart from their families and being taken away from their homes. The prisoners also had to get used different a lot of other changes. They were no longer free and able to live life like a normal human. In his article, Bettelheim describes this process perfectly. He states that, “It was senseless tasks, the lack of almost any time to oneself, the inability to plan ahead because of sudden changes in camp policies, that was so deeply destructive. By destroying man’s ability to act on his own or to predict the outcome of his actions, they destroyed the feeling that his actions had any purpose, so many prisoners stopped acting. But when they stopped acting they soon stopped living” (396). It’s hard to imagine being taking away from everything I have ever known, and then being forced to live my life according to what someone else wanted. I now understand how hard it was for Eliezer to grow accustom to being in the concentration camps. They went from living like humans, to being treated like animals.
ReplyDeleteJahvonda C. Glenn
Here is the information for anyone who is interested in learning more about Kabbalah. The classes are hosted by chabad, one of the jewish student organizations on campus. There are also other classes about Jewish tradition and such along with the one on Kabbalah. :)
ReplyDeletehttp://Jlearn.org/
Each week, our campus Chabad family comes together for spirited Shabbat dinners and fascinating conversation. Why stop there? Browse jLearn minicourses and let’s continue the discussion!