Reflection About Mysteries

In the beginning scene when his father enters the room, the camera continues to focus on Benjamin while his father’s image is blurred sitting in front of Benjamin and blocking most of his face. His mother later enters the room and stands in front of the camera completely obscuring Benjamin. These scenes shows that his parents are constantly getting in Benjamin’s way of his feelings and he cannot see past the image of his parent identity like he is destine to become them. Although he tells his father that he wants to be “different”, Benjamin does not have control of his own life. When Benjamin does not want to come down to see the guests and he “needs to be alone for a while” because he is ‘worried about his future’ his parent does not even care a bit and insist that he goes down stair because they are eager to show him to the guest. As he head toward the steps, there was portrait of a clown at the top of the stairs symbolizing that he is headed to a social circus as if he was in a costume putting on an act like they are show casing him for entertainment and no one takes him seriously.

  The books Brave New World by Aldus Huxley and Anthem by Ayn Rand are both valuable twentieth-century contributions to literature. Both books explore the presence of natural law in man and propose a warning for what could happen when man's sense of right and wrong is taken from him. In this essay, I hope to show how these seemingly unrelated novels both expound upon a single, very profound, idea.

One of the most outstanding characteristics of humans is that we have a moral conscience- the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, as well as understand the consequences of actions beforehand. Nonetheless, religion remains important to society because it helps to refine and provide a deeper understanding of humans’ moral responsibility. There are instances where either people ignore religious practices in favor of reason and logic or follow only religious teachings that suit a particular situation. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a novella that typifies the failure of religion to unify people and provide a common course for understanding life. The story talks about Santiago’s fight against fate and the probability of escaping death that is foretold beforehand. The priest symbolizes religion in the novella and readers observe that his actions are similar to those of ordinary people. Ordinarily, we expect the priest to uphold religious practices and bring people together when society is divided on an issue.

After experiencing life similar to hell on earth for nearly a year very few people could truthfully say that their faith is unscathed. Even in the modern world, people who have not been starved and pushed to work beyond their limits find themselves questioning whether or not there is a god, and if he is a just one. Throughout Night, a Holocaust memoir, it is shown that faith does not only refer to religion, but also the belief that humanity is sympathetic and warm-hearted. Elie Wiesel, author of Night, demonstrates how he loses his faith and watches those around him lose their confidence in God, and each other. Wiesel shares his thoughts with the readers writing how from a very young age he believed profoundly yet within a few months Wiesel finds himself questioning “Where is God?” (61). Loss of faith only propels Wiesel to find the strength within himself to persevere until his day of liberation.

The nursing home that Benjamin knew as a boy always welcomed him back home. Benjamin returned to New Orleans in 1945 and back to his mother Queenie. Daisy visits with him after his return; both are nearing the same age in appearance. At this point Daisy tries to seduce Benjamin but Benjamin refuses her efforts. Its as though Benjamin is aware of his own age, Scheidt (2017) mentions that during middle age

Throughout centuries, humans have expressed different perspectives toward a single idea. The subject of religion invites challenging discussions from skeptical minds because religion is diversely interpreted based on personal faith. The authoress sets her novel in a fictional town, Cold Sassy, where religion plays a predominant role in people’s lives. Through Will Tweedy’s narration she explores the religious opinions of the town’s most prominent citizen Rucker Blakeslee, Will’s grandpa. Although Blakeslee spent his whole life in a religiously conservative town, he has a radical approach toward religious concepts such as predestination, suicide, funerals, faith, and God’s will, thus forcing him to challenge the traditional views of

Imagine about 1.5 million of kids killed in the holocaust and up to 6 millions Jews died. The people in the holocaust has to question their faith of all the apprehension that made people grip on their faith in their crisis. Many Jewish people in the book Night, by Elie Wiesel had seen and been through the shocking horrors that shaken their faith. In the book people tried to survive the chamber while maintaining their faith. Shocking events that are currently happening in today's society that made people struggle to maintain faith they once had because of an act of violence, war, and death. In the book Night the theme “struggle to maintain faith” is admissible in today society.

Religion often holds a huge amount of significance in one’s life. Since it requires lots of time and patience, some people lose their faith when confronted with a tough situation. When a population becomes persecuted or executed for their beliefs, this becomes especially noticeable. In the Holocaust, a number of Jews began to question their faith, and departed from the religion as a whole. In the memoir Night, Elie Wiesel obscures the distinctions between his father and God, displays an opening void, and shows the misunderstanding of his belief in religion to express the loss of faith and the role that the spiritual and physical body possess in retaining religion.

Drastic events may change the way we view the world. It may cause us to lose our belief in God, family, and humanity. Loss of faith is displayed in Elie Wiesel’s “Night”. “Night” follows Elie’s teenage life in a Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Initially Elie has a great faith in family, humanity, and God. As days gone by inside the camp, he witnessed and experienced countless cruel acts by humans against humans. This acts have made Elie question his beliefs. In the memoir people have questioned their faith in humanity, family, and lastly God.

During times of terrible trajedy, a person’s belief in religious faith may be shaken. Some people may not believe in a religion as strongly after they learn the truth or the story of that religion.

Religion also plays an important function in allowing the authors to comment on society and faith’s role in it. For example, both authors seem to be suggesting that our religion is only compatible in society as we know it, that is to say that it is not compatible with other situations. In The Children of Men a major disruption to the working of society, mass infertility, has led to a total destruction of the Christian faith. In Brave New World, an unstoppable surge of machinery and technology has led to the disregard of religious moral and the introduction of a new set of hedonist attitudes, both scenarios being deplored by the reader. This could also be seen as the authors’ asserting that a civilized society desperately needs stable religion and morals, given that the utter breakdown in The Children of Men is arguably as shocking as the superficial worship of machinery and pleasure in Brave New World.

Identity typically changes with age, however he changes very little because he does not have full awareness of his identity. “Age identity refers to the inner most experience of a person’s age and aging process” (Jose 2017). Fitzgerald emphasizes Benjamin’s loss of consciousness more in the novel than Fincher does in the film. At a certain point, Benjamin stops struggling to determine who he is and just essentially waits for time to run out. He would play simply games with his grandson when they are both around the age of children beginning kindergarten. Benjamin and his grandson would continue this until he passed away. In contrast, it seems that Benjamin and his wife fight further to the end in the film, and he passes away with her by his side. The relationship between Benjamin and Daisy was stronger in the film than in the novel. His identity is very important to him in the middle of his life when he wants to go to college and enroll in the war, but towards the end he loses awareness of any self-perception he had built and slips into

Now in the literary story Benjamin has a grandfather who at the start was antagonized, became to enjoy his grandson’s company. It is a brief account of his grandfather but a meaningful one as this was the first one who gave him a sense of acceptance. The film version gave him acceptance through Queenie and we never get to know a grandfather; though one could say the patrons at the old folk’s home could have been grandparent surrogates for Benjamin. The patrons at the old folks home taught him many things but his experience living there taught him not to fear death and what loss was about which, in a sense, desensitized the character so that when Queenie passes he is not visibly upset.

The French philosopher Roland Barthes once said, “Literature is the question minus the answer” (Barthes 2). This statement hold true for most works of literature that explore a central question. According to Barthes, literature often raises a question, but leaves it up to the reader to determine the answer. The Stranger by Albert Camus is an excellent example of how a central question, “Is there value and meaning to human life?” is raised and left unanswered, resulting in different interpretations of the answer, depending on the viewpoint of the reader. Although the question is never explicitly answered, Camus offers perspectives on what French society regarded the answers to be, such as connections with others, elusion to freedom, and faith in religion and God.

The leading minds of science and literature were playing right into the hands of the common man at the most opportune time in history. The blind trust in religion was beginning to fade and the papal order was beginning to be shrouded in skepticism. Unquestioningly taking someone else’s word for what was true and acceptable was a thing of the past. The average individual was beginning to doubt the existence of an all-powerful God and turn his or her attention inward. The landscape of Europe and the world would forever be changed by these new revolutionary ideas and go on to influence the crusaders of the American and French Revolution.