IB Paper 2 on comparing two books while answering one of the given questions

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Levi and O`Brien’s storybooks’ Settings in Understanding Themes
The storybooks, If This Is a Man and The Things They Carried by Primo Levi and Tim O`Brien respectively have a lot in common in term of themes. In If This Is a Man, Levi gives the narration in a first-person language as he shares his account during his arrest and detention at Auschwitz detention camp. The Things They Carried, on the other hand, is a story by an unnamed narrator who gives, in third person language, an account about the actions and thoughts of Jimmy Cross, an Army Lieutenant who was in active duty during the Vietnam War. All through, the settings of both If This Is a Man and The Things They Carried play a big role in helping readers understand the themes or central ideas.
O`Brien`s The Things They Carried is set majorly in a war-torn zone during the time of the Vietnam War. The warfare, in this case, is not about violence and using tactics or heroism. It is made up of intervals of boredom and other times of true terror. This is also the case in Levi`s If This Is a Man. In his description on how a night was while at the camps, he says, “one wakes up every moment, frozen with terror, shaking in every limb under the impression of order, shouted out by a voice full of anger in a language not understood” (Levi 69).
Dehumanization of people is also a common theme between the two individual books. The violent actions that the soldiers are involved in and the things they carried mentally and physically have a negative effect on the soldiers’ well-being, showing that O`Brien is of the notion that nothing good comes as a result of war for any party involved.

In If This Is A Man, Primo and his fellow prisoners are kept in camps and get through various kinds of suffering. The intention of all such suffering is a method of dehumanizing the prisoners, by stripping them of their possessions, names, and hair. They are treated like animals and not like people with rights and feelings. Levi`s statement supports this observation, “In this place, everything is forbidden, not for hidden reasons but because the camp has been created for that purpose” (Levi 24).
Additionally, language and cultural identity play a key role in If This Is a Man. These were lasting characteristics of the prisoners of war which the Nazis could not take away from them like their hair and personal possessions. Language is what played a key role in unifying individuals or separating them in the concentration camps. The Nazi`s used a number of euphemisms in order to keep everyone from knowing their true reason for setting up concentration camps. It also divided prisoners because they were of different origins and this confusion kept them disoriented and separated to an extent. In O`Brien`s account, the men use language as a way of escaping from the harsh reality of war by using rough language and jokes in order to protect themselves from the war horrors. They named burned babies “Crispy Critters” so that they could do away with the reality of dead infants. The men also use language to create some form of separation between them and “the others.”
In If This Is A Man, the prisoners of war go through intense moments of grief due to their state of hopelessness. Levi in his account says, “we collected in a group in front of their door, and we experienced within ourselves a grief that was new for us, an ancient grief of the people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed every century” (Levi 9). The young man in O`Brien`s book is a vivid representation of all the faceless victims of Vietnamese origin. The picture that he saw during this time gave him and some of the other men momentary grief. He says that “there were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.” (O`Brien 115).
Levi`s writing style is personal. This is because he is talking about events that have happened to him or scenes that he had first-hand experience with or was directly involved in. His writing is straightforward, as evidenced in his recollection of the routine the prisoners went through daily. “One Sunday in every two is a regular working day; on the so-called holiday Sundays, instead of working at Buna, one normally works on the upkeep of the Lager, so that days of real rest are extremely rare” (Levi 34). O’Brien, on the other hand, uses a different structure where he employs two characters, his own self and the fictional Tim O`Brien in the story. He switches from a first-person narrative voice to a third-person narrator. In the field, on his admission of responsibility for Kiowa`s death, the third-person narration amplifies the mixed feelings of guilt and pain. The separation between his actions in the field with Kiowa and himself demonstrates how much the occurrence hurts him.
The occurrences described in If This Is A Man took place during the World War 2 where Jews and other people unwanted by society from all over Europe were taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp to do hard labor and later on killed once they stopped being useful laborers. The book employs the use of a single setting where the writer, Levi, spent a number of days in and experienced his own share of the inhumane nature of war. O’Brien’s account, on the other hand, takes place in two different settings. The jungles of Vietnam and the hometown of the soldiers that fought in the jungles. O`Brien uses the jungle setting to show vividly and explain the fear and paranoid nature in the troops.
In conclusion, the storybooks, If This Is a Man and The Things They Carried, have a good outline with relatable scenes from being told in a narrative manner, from the difficulty and hopelessness in Levi`s book to the soldier`s experiences in the Vietnamese war in O`Brien`s. The two books speak of a time of war and strife. They demonstrate the negativity of war. The stories are easy to follow because they are descriptive and detailed and move from scene to scene in a fluid manner even though O`Brien`s story contains a collection of different individual accounts. The use of various tools such as symbolism and vivid imagery adds to the overall effect exuded by the accounts from the two individuals. Overall they are good and informative reads.

Works Cited
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. London: Flamingo, 1991.
Levi, Primo. If This Is a Man. New York: The Orion Press, Inc., 1959.