Journal/Journalism
Study: Paragraph 3
Conflict:
Conflict is often expressed in the following terms:
Man vs. Self
Man Vs. Man
Man Vs. Society
Write
a paragraph that identifies the central conflict of the narrative and show how
that conflict is both developed and resolved.
Remember
that your paragraph should contain a hook
and clincher (come full circle)!
Ex: Struggling against the forces of a
democratic government can often seem daunting, but that struggle pales in
comparison to struggling against the unbridled power of a totalitarian regime.
Elie Wiesel’s man vs. society conflict is told in his tale of survival, Night. The narrator is a young Jewish
boy who, with his father, has been imprisoned because he is a Jew. The whole
story is about his struggle to survive the holocaust and this much is clear –
his survival is the mixed result of perseverance and luck. Wiesel, at one point
while in the camp hospital wonders, “Were the SS going to leave hundreds of
prisoners to strut about in the hospital blocks, waiting for the liberators?...
Obviously not.” (Weisel, 1960, p. 87). It would be so easy for the totalitarian
Nazi regime to simply have him, like millions of others, killed. The allied
armies of the USA, England and The Soviet Union combine to overthrow the Nazis,
and only because of this military victory is the conflict that Elie has with
the state resolved in his favour. His was an almost impossible struggle, and
without outside forces he would never have succeeded.
