12 Years A Slave Movie And Book Comparison Essay

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After reading the book and watching the movie 12 Years a Slave there are many differences that have become apparent between the two also with a lot of similarities. some of these differences minor and others major. Although both the book and movie were in pursuit of the same message the end point was reached in different ways. for instance in the book some people in general were perceived to be much nicer than they were shown to be in the movie. Solomon Northup and Steve McQueen, the director of the movie,
In the book, Solomon described a number of incidents that occurred when he was being transported to the South. For example when he and the slaves around him planned an uprising, before one of them fell ill and died – or, how Solomon encountered a sailor who helped him and wrote a letter to Solomon’s friends in the North. However, although you might think the sailor would treat this as his moral responsibility, the way Solomon described it, the sailor regarded what he did for Solomon as a simple favor. By comparison, in the film we see the slaves being harassed, raped and murdered, by the captions of the boats. But in the book written in the first person solomon does not focus or even talk about this as much as it is seen in the movie. I believe this is due to the fact that Steve McQueen was trying to portray the life
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In my opinion this done because Steve McQueen realizes the power of see and visualizing something. Because of this he made the characters a little bit harsher in the movie than they were seen to be in the book and he made everything seem harder and more violent, than I anticipated it would be after just reading the book. Additionally I think that Solomon made everyone out to be nicer than they were seen to be in the movie. In conclusion it seems like the Solomon in the movie lived a much harder life than the Solomon in the

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