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Self Preservation In Night By Elie Wiesel

1480 Words6 Pages

" Physically: Gregor literally crawls into his room, lays down on the floor, and takes his last breath. Mentally: Gregor's family alienates him and is ultimately responsible for Gregor's death through their negligence. Clearly, the bug is Gregor, but Mr. and Mrs. Samsa and Grete treat 'it' as if he was scum." They were treating him as though he was invisible. They would literally walk past his room every day and attend their family dinners without saying anything to Gregor at all. They just didn’t acknowledge his presence at all and that was ultimately the reason for his downfall. Another story that focuses on the theme, self-preservation, is Night by Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel is one of the very few people who successfully managed to survive …show more content…

His father meant everything to him, seeing as how he was the only family that Elie had left. Elie and his father, along with all of the other Jews, had to fight endlessly in order to preserve their lives. The German soldiers had created the perfect system designed for the steady demise of a group of people. Everyday a person would die. The Holocaust lasted for so long without any given hope of liberation that the people that were suffering thought of death as their new way of life. Elie himself said, " The instincts of self-preservation... us(Wiesel 36)". It had even gotten to the point where the Jews started to turn on each other. They would attack other Jews in an attempt to steal their food from them. Even children had begun to turn on their parents. They would abandon their parents so that they wouldn't have to worry about taking care of them anymore. One of the ways that the Germans would execute the Jews were by burning them alive. The term '"furnace" brought fear to the Jews. Whenever they heard the word, they would tremble in fear because they had already known what was going to happen to a select few of them. A quote from the book Night says, "We had already lived through so much that …show more content…

Blanche is projecting the self-image of a person who believes that they are above others. She acts as though she is of a royal family and demands the respect of everyone around her. She loses her family's home to the government and blames it on her sister who left in order to search for her own lifestyle. From the beginning of her visit, Blanche gets an off feeling about Stanley. When she arrives, he starts to stare at her with a sense of caution then soon begins inspecting the paperwork that she brought with her in order to validate her story. A while after she got settled in, Blanche witnessed Stanley physically abusing her sister, Stella, and then started secretly rebuking Stanley to Stella. She saw their relationship as unhealthy and tried everything that she could to destroy it. After overhearing Blanche telling Stella to get rid of him, Stanley begins to steadily contemplate his revenge. He had made it his personal goal to dig deeper into her past and he found pretty much all the information that he needed in order to get rid of her. In order to preserve his relationship with his wife, Stanley came up with an amazingly credible plan to permanently get rid of

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