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. These characters are also emotionally affected by the common themes in the novels: inequality and injustice.
Elie Wiesel used setting to bring out the depressed state that the entire Jewish race is in during the novel. One setting that depicted how emotions affected Elie is when he was on the train to the concentration camps. Wiesel depicted these trains as horrific and disgusting. Fear for death and what will happen next caused Elie to remain strong and protect his ill father from other people on the train. The next setting was Auschwitz where Wiesel uses imagery to show how unsettled Elie was; he looks back and sees thousands of people marching behind and along dead bodies after dead bodies. Elie continues to march, not because he understood why this was being done to him and other Jews, but because he was angry at the injustice he suffered. Elie even started to deny his faith, something that he believed in so dearly, because he was distraught at the fact that his family and friends were taken from him.
Harper Lee chose the setting of Maycomb, a racist town in the 1930’s, to depict the emotion of not only Atticus, but of the whole town of Maycomb. Atticus defended a black man 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. He was not rationalizing the outcomes of his decision because after he accepted the position his town looked down upon him and his family; since he was very emotional about keeping justice he overcomes the discrimination. Lee also used imagery with Boo Radley’s house. He depicted 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, unlike Atticus.
Both novels shared 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 was 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 showed 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 showed how not only are individual choices affected by emotion, but society and political choices are affected by emotion too.
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