How Man's Humanness Can Be Taken Away At The Hand's Of Another.“
4 Pages 892 Words
“How man’s sense of being human can be taken away at the hand’s of another.”
Man’s identity lies in the ability to understand him as being a human that is free. He is free to have his own thoughts and opinions about the world around him and to make his own decisions regarding how he lives his life. When that ability is taken away, he is no longer a human being. He now becomes an animal hunting for one last sense of himself. He strives to hold onto what little sanity he has left and tests his own memory that is beginning to deteriorate. He regales himself with thoughts that he used to hold near and dear to his heart. Like Primo Levi does while he is trying to keep his sanity while in Auschwitz he tries to remember the “Canto of Ulysses” from Dante’s inferno. Try as he might he cannot seem to recall it in any order whatsoever. He has now become a desperate man. He struggles to get a grip on the situation but notices him falling even further into oblivion. This is only one instance out of many in which he tries to get a grip on reality but fails and loses!
a sense of being.
A human as it evolves becomes more intelligent and gains more knowledge of the outside world. This makes the person a whole and separates one from another. In dire circumstances such as when a person’s entire world is crushed, they can begin to lose a sense of being in this world. For instance, during the holocaust people were taken away from their homes and stripped of all personal belongings. They were crammed into railroad cars where they had no place to use the restroom or even to move about. The elders in the group did not survive because of the squalor that was thrust upon them. They were then taken to a place where they were forced to fight each other for what little food was given to them. Their life became a daily struggle to push themselves to live on from day to day. They are no longer humans but animal machines in the sense that they fi...