Perseverance In Elie Wiesel's Life Is Beautiful

“The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future,” (Wiesel xv). This testimony is substantiated in the form of Night, a historical memoir written from the perspective of a fifteen year-old boy documenting his experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp throughout 1944 and 1945. Elie Wiesel, the aforementioned adolescent and author, writes about the day he is liberated from the terroristic clutches of the Holocaust, grateful for the sacrifices his father makes to enable his survival. Alongside Night, among the many films and literary works that are centered around the Holocaust, another writer, Roberto Benigni, portrays the various sacrifices fathers had to make for their sons. Life is Beautiful, an …show more content…
Night by Elie Wiesel, and Life is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni, both vividly depict the Holocaust, and although the theme of perseverance develops the attitudes and actions of the main characters similarly, the recurring concept of self preservation establishes two contrasting moods, portraying two seemingly incompatible recounts of the systematic mass murdering that plagued the end of World War II. The theme of perseverance is apparent both Night and Life is Beautiful, where it develops the main characters’ attitudes and actions in a similar manner as the characters are continuing on through the difficulties they face, and their attitudes transform from defeatist to persistent. Perseverance drives the main actions of the characters and their attitudes reflect their reluctant, yet adamant, dispositions. Elie Wiesel, in his memoir Night, begins to relish the idea of death, where he takes comfort in knowing that “[he] would no longer feel anything, neither fatigue nor cold,” and he almost allows himself to “break rank” and “slide to the side of the