Keeping Hope Alive: Comparing Perspectives in 'Night' and 'Survivors Club' Sofia Ribeiro 10th Grade

Martin Luther King once said, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope,” He is known for being a beacon of hope when times seemed hopeless. Survivors Club explores themes of keeping hope alive when it seemed like it was impossible, in a memoir about the Holocaust’s best hiders. What happens, however, when that hope is lost for good? Night contrasts that optimistic tone and exposes a boy’s lost battle with hope. The tone of Survivors Club and Night is different because one author has a pessimistic perspective while the other has a more optimistic outlook, which is largely dependant on having hope or a lack thereof.

Family gives people a sense of strength to keep on living and being separated from them can take away from one’s will to live. Having no desire to continue to live on makes for a very pessimistic tone, as Elie did when he thought his father had died from exhaustion when they were at the very end of their journey to a new camp in a convoy of cars in Night. Elie wonders what it would be like if he were actually dead as a lot of other people were, and he calls out to him but there is no response. Elie realizes in that moment that, without his father, “there was no longer any reason to live, any...