Adversity In Tuesdays With Morrie And Night

Kevin Conroy once said, “Everyone is handed adversity in life. No one’s journey is easy. It’s how they handle it that makes people unique.” What Conroy said happens to be extremely relevant and true. Every person who has ever walked the Earth has dealt with adversity in one form or another at least once in his or her life. Two novels, Tuesdays with Morrie, written by Mitch Albom, and Night, written by Elie Wiesel, exemplify the thought of adversity perfectly. Each character battles through the difficulties in his life to make it better for themselves and for those around them. Each novel expresses the theme of adversity through inhumanity, faith, and death. Adversity is synonymous with the words difficulty and misfortune. In Tuesdays with Morrie and Night, the main characters in each novel both face adversity through inhumanity. Both Morrie and Elie have to go through things that are simply unfair to them. Morrie, who was once a bright, electric, happy-go-lucky kind of man, has been struck with a heartbreaking disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, otherwise known as ALS. In the novel, Morrie tells Mitch that the disease has slowly overtaken his body. Morrie is no longer physically able to shop, take care of his bank account, or take out the garbage. All that Morrie is really able to do is to sit back and to truly cherish the short remainder of his life (Albom 49-50). While Morrie does not have a negative attitude about anything in his life, he realizes that what the ALS is doing to
his body is inhumane, and therefore one source of adversity in his life. Another piece of adversity in Morrie’s life is faith. Faith can have many definitions, but for Morrie, his faith is not quite decided. He has floated back and forth from many different religions and is knowledgeable about many gods. In Tuesdays with Morrie, Morrie’s advice to Mitch is to, “Do what the Buddhists do. Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, ‘Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?’” (Albom 81). This excerpt is a wonderful depiction of Morrie’s faith. He just takes a little bit of each religion because he does not quite identify with just one. Perhaps Morrie finds adversity in the fact that he can not thoroughly believe in a single religion while it is easy for others to do so. The third and final theme in which Morrie faces adversity in his novel is death. When Morrie gets diagnosed with ALS, he immediately knows that the end of his life is going to come sooner that he thought. While he is going about his life as normal as he can manage to, Mitch feels no consolation in Morrie’s certain death. During one of Mitch and Morrie’s weekly meetings, Morrie tries to help Mitch out by telling him, “Don’t let go too soon, but don’t hang on too long,” (Albom 162). A guaranteed death is not something that anyone wants to hear, whether it is his or her own, or that of a loved one. Both Mitch and Morrie, along with everyone else who is important to these two men, see the diagnostic of Morrie as something that is completely unfair to this wise old man. Adversity does indeed show up in everyone’s life at least once, but Morrie is unique for handling his own case as well as he did. He tried with every bit of strength that he had left in him to fight his personal adversity, ALS. Because of this, Morrie is a role model for anyone to look up to in times of defeat. While Tuesdays with Morrie deals with adversity in a calm and rather silent manner, Night deals with it in a completely opposite way. A young boy of only fifteen years old faces the greatest level of adversity that human history has ever known: the Holocaust. In this novel, Elie faces the difficulties and misfortune every single night. It is quite obvious that the Holocaust showed inhumanity to the Jewish people. What the Jews had to go through due to one man’s hatred was simply inhumane. In the novel, Elie notes that he was treated like an animal. He, along with seventy-nine other people, were shoved into a cattle car on the way to the concentration camp (Wiesel 22). If being treated like an animal does not show inhumanity, then nothing does. Another theme that goes along with adversity in Night is faith. Before he was transported to the concentration camp, Elie was a boy who had amazing faith in God. He prayed to his God every night. However, when Elie saw a young child publicly executed in the camp, he began to question his faith. He hears a man behind him ask, “For God’s sake, where is God?” He responds, “Where He is? There is where- hanging here from this gallows,” (Wiesel 65). This is when Elie has lost all faith in God. He feels as though God has left him and the other prisoners to deal with this adversity on their own. The hanging of the young child and other prisoners leads to the next theme of death. Every morning that Elie wakes up in the camp, he wonders if today will be the day he dies. He has witnessed so many other deaths since arriving at the camp, and he can not help but wonder if today will be his turn. Upon arrival, Elie’s sisters and mother were killed. Losing family members is no walk in the park for anyone. Elie Wiesel deals with the adversity in his life in a different way than Morrie. While each men knew he was bound to die, Morrie was not sad, but Elie was. Elie was also afraid of dying because he knew that if he died, his father would not make it out of the camp alive. Elie was mostly numb to the adversity in his life, but he still never gave up. As Conroy noce said, every person does deal with adversity in his or her life.
How each person deals with it is what makes the difference. In Tuesdays with Morrie and Night, both main characters have to deal with some gruesome situations. Both Morrie and Elie deal with their adversity in different ways, but both were appropriate ways in their differing situations. While adversity is not something that can be avoided in life, it is something to work around and to battle
through.