Night V. Life Is Beautiful Essay

Night vs. Life is Beautiful When people look at two extremely different stories such as Night and Life is Beautiful, they would not expect there to be many similarities. However, these two devastating tales are more alike than suspected. Both Night and Life is Beautiful may be two accounts of the holocaust, but that does not mean that they bring the same thing to the table. They both may include a somewhat similar father-son relationship, yet they still aren’t that same. Night, a tragic memoir of Eliezer Wiesel, and Life is Beautiful, a humorous and still somewhat depressing movie of Guido and his family, have numerous similarities as well as drastic differences between them. There were numerous differences between the two stories. First of all, Life is Beautiful had a much lighter and amusing tone to the story. The father attempted to turn the deportation into a game with a system of points. Then, when all of the kids were gassed in the gas chambers, Guido put a twist on the “game” by shifting it into a hide-and-seek type of game. The less the guards saw Joshua, Guido’s son, the more points they gained. Throughout Guido’s attempt to conceal the truth of the absolute horror of the concentration camps from his son, the task proves to be rather difficult and causes Guido to go through a number of humorous actions to make sure his son doesn’t discover the reality. However, in Night, Elie knew right off the bat that nothing was sugar-coated or fun about concentration camps. Of course, the fact that he spoke German and therefore understood the guards also contributed to the fact that he could not have possibly been protected from the truth. Then, the officers also tried to make the concentration camps sound better than they actually were by saying labor camps were located on site. However, all of the lies were revealed as untrue once the families stepped off the trains. The tone was never humorous or even slightly relaxed in Night as it was in Life is Beautiful.