Dinamarie Tsoukalas

                According to Duff Brenna, “All literature shows us the power of emotion; it is emotion, not reason that motivates characters in literature”. In other words Brenna is saying that characters are affected by their feelings, which could be anything from happiness, fear, love, or anger. He is also saying that characters are not affected by their rationales or explanations. This is shown to be true in Night written by Elie Wiesel, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Setting and imagery are used in these two novels to depict the main characters’ emotions.

                Elie Wiesel uses setting to bring out the depressed state that all if the Jewish race is in during the novel. The novel starts in Sighet, where many Jewish are living during the 1940’s. Then the setting is moved to the trains that the Jewish were taken to concentration camps. Wiesel depicts these trains as horrific and disgusting because there is no room, people yelling at each other for tiny rations of food, and it reeks of death. The next setting is the actual concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, where Elie describes the marches the Nazis made them run. He uses imagery to show how unsettling this scene is. Elie looks back and sees thousands of people marching behind and then after an hour he marches along the side of dead bodies after dead bodies. Throughout these two scenes Elie stayed strong not because he understood why this was being done to his father and himself, but because he wanted to survive. He ran in fear of what was going to be done to him.  The last setting was in Buchewald, where the Jews were freed, but Elie was never emotionally free. He described himself in the mirror as, “a corpse gazing back at me”. He was never going to be the same because his emotions were altered from discrimination and from being treated like a slave.

                Harper Lee uses setting to depict the emotion of not only Atticus, but of the whole town of Maycomb. The novel is based in a southern town in the early 1930’s where there was a lot of racism. Atticus defends a black man, Tom Robinson, because he was driven by his emotional belief that everyone should have the same privilege of receiving a fair trial no matter what skin color. After he accepts the position his town looks down upon him and his family, but since he is very emotional about keeping justice he overcomes the discrimination and teaches his kids to do the same. Lee also uses imagery with Boo Radley’s house who is another black man. He depicts his house as a “haunted mansion” and a horrible place to even go near. The town didn’t go near his house because the town was emotionally afraid of difference. They were unhappy with change which led them to be judgmental and neglect anyone that showed a slight difference.

                Both novels share the same themes, which are the existence of inequality and injustice. It is this existence of inequality that forced Atticus to be a lawyer for Tom Robinson and Elie to continue fighting to survive in the concentration camps. Both of them were faced with discrimination because of their beliefs, but they remained strong and exceeded everything that was put in front of them. Social discrimination, religious discrimination, and even a father’s death didn’t stop both of these characters to stand up for what is right.

                The two novels, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Night by Elie Wiesel both prove the quote by Duff Brenna. Both novels show that emotion is what drives a character to perform the actions he or she makes. The main emotion that was prevalent throughout the two novels was fear of the unknown.  The two novels also show how not only are individual choices affected by emotion, but society and political choices are affected by emotion too.