Review - Book Report/Review Example

The setting of the book takes place mostly in the concentration camp Auschwitz, called the Lager by the inmates. The book moves in a linear fashion, so that the story moves realistically in time. The point of view of the book is that the narrator is an inmate of Auschwitz, a prisoner. There are no sources used except for the author’s own experience and memory. From this perspective, somewhat obviously, the opinions of the author are very strong, especially in terms of an anti-German perspective, and the author can be called intentionalist.

Several times in the text, Levi posits that the concentration camp at Auschwitz is an extension of German society in which the prisoners are trapped with few common languages and subjected to the codes and even music of a foreign culture that is then associated by the prisoners with their horrible collective situation. It is arguable that the camps are also serve Levi’s portrayal as a twentieth-century phenomenon in which industrialized and faceless citizens are made to perform ridiculous tasks by laughing guards.

The survivors of the camps, judging by Levi’s text, are those who maintain at least some semblance of humanity and its inherent adaptability. Those who are unable to find the will to survive and adapt to the changes in life evinced by the concentration camp’s schedule die, as, notably, do those who follow the schedule. or her will to survive due to physical and mental exhaustion. This is, to the author, “Precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton” (Levi, 48).

This is a bleak view of survival, but also a very realistic one. The book makes sense in terms of the way it was