Elie Wiesel's Night and Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglassare two memoirs about young men struggling to survive in inhuman conditions. The first thread that ties both memoirs together is slavery. Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland. After brutal experiences at the hands of his overseers, Douglass escaped to the North at the age of twenty. Elie Wiesel became a slave at the age of fifteen when he and...
Elie Wiesel's Night and Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass are two memoirs about young men struggling to survive in inhuman conditions. The first thread that ties both memoirs together is slavery. Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland. After brutal experiences at the hands of his overseers, Douglass escaped to the North at the age of twenty. Elie Wiesel became a slave at the age of fifteen when he and his family were taken to Auschwitz. As he was strong enough for work, he and other Jewish prisoners performed physical labor to benefit the Nazi war machine. As Elie knew running away would bring certain death, he had to wait for the Allied liberation.
Another similarity the two memoirs share is the age of the narrator. Both Elie and Frederick are young men coming of age in terrible conditions. Also, both of their true life stories reflect the belief that people can overcome horrific experiences in order to work towards the greater good as adults.
Though these two memoirs have much in common, they are unique in a variety of ways. For example, the focus of the Narrative is a single person, Frederick Douglass. Though the focus of Night is Elie Wiesel, the book gives multiple examples of how the Holocaust affected different people in a variety of ways. The reader gains a comprehensive view of the Holocaust from Night, while the Narrative provides a more limited view of American slavery.
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