Comparison

    Before We Were Free and Night differ from earlier readings this semester in that they focus on adolescents who are thrown into events of historical significance and experience extreme hardships at the hands of oppressive regimes- Anita is forced to flee the Dominican Republic following her family’s participation in the opposition and assassination of Trujillo- While Anita is a fictional character, her experiences are based upon Julia Alvarez’s own recollections of life in the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo dictatorship before her family left for the United States in 1960- Night, by contrast, is an autobiographical account by Elie Wiesel, whose family was sent to Nazi concentration camps in 1944- Eliezar’s first-hand account not only bears witness to the cruelty and inhumanity of the Holocaust, but also represents the impossible situation into which he was forced, as a sixteen-year-old child, in relation to his beloved but physically-declining father. Eliezar recognizes the brutal circumstances which compel him to choose between love and survival as utterly unforgivable- Wiesel presents his narrative as that of an adolescent, when he was “at an age when one’s knowledge of death and evil should be limited to what one discovers in literature” (vii)- This will be true of many of the young readers who encounter Alvarez and Wiesel’s novels: they will, fortunately, learn about evil through the words of the authors rather than through first-hand experience- In this essay, you will focus on the depiction of historically-based narratives of trauma and survival in Before We Were Free and Night- What similarities can you find between adolescents’ encounters with death and evil in the two novels? How do the depictions of their experiences differ? Link these similarities and differences to the primary genres of the novels- Keep in mind that while Before We Were Free is written specifically for a young adult audience, Night (although it depicts the experiences of an adolescent) has a much broader audience as an important piece of Holocaust literature- How does the target audience (and the perspectives, experiences, and knowledge of this audience) influence the ways in which death and evil are approached and represented? Why do you think this is? Your response to this prompt should be 3-5 pages long, double-spaced, with 1-inch margins- You do not need to cite secondary sources in your essay, but you must support your argument with evidence from the primary texts-