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. While these two stories seem more different than similar, more comparisons than contrasts can be found. For example, Night and Life is Beautiful are both centered around their similar themes.
Their common theme is that when someone has another person to love and something to hope for, they are capable of incredible things. In Night, Elie and his father’s love and hope depend on each other. As long as they were both alive, Elie as well as his father had a reason to stay alive and maintain their hope. But once Elie’s father died, the one person Elie could put his love and hope into was gone. In Life is Beautiful, Guido’s family all depend on each other. The father depends on his son and wife; the son depends on his mother and father; and the mother depends on her son and husband.
They each put a little bit of their hope and love into each other. So, when Guido dies, a little part of his wife and son dies as well taking a small part of their hope and love with him. Another similarity between these two fascinating stories is the father-son relationship. As stated in the previous similarity, they rely on each other. However, these two relationships are different within their similarity. Between Elie and Chlomo, Elie’s father, they had a strong relationship that kept them going through everything. At one point, Elie even helped his father get the marching pattern right so Chlomo would not get hurt.
Also, Elie gave his bread to his father even when the more logical thing to do was to keep it for himself since he was obviously the only one who had a chance at life then. In this case, a family bond trumped logic and seems to always do so. The father-son relationship between Guido and his son, Joshua, in Life is Beautiful is similar to that of Elie and Chlomo. Throughout the film, Guido and Joshua seemed inseparable. They couldn’t life without each other. Without Joshua, Guido would have almost given up hope. The same is for Joshua. However, in this father-son relationship, the mother is also included in their hope to stay alive.
So, if Joshua or Guido were to lose one another, they would still have the hope to find their mother or wife. Night and Life is Beautiful have numerous similarities as well as drastic differences between them. Night, a tragic memoir, and Life is Beautiful, a more humorous and funny yet still depressing story, share a common theme and moral proving that these two somewhat different tales share even more likenesses. So, clearly, two stories may have more in common than suspected no matter how different their tones and point-of-views may be.
