Comparing Beloved and the Night The two novels I'm writing about are "Night" by Elie Wiesel and "Beloved" by Toni Morrison. Beloved chronicles slavery and the struggle of a former slave mother with a past that is projected as haunting to her people. It tells the story of Sethe, a mother forced to kill her son, rather than let him live a life of slavery. Toni Morrison uses ghosts and the supernatural to create greater acceptance of the human condition and the plight of black Americans to survive. The novel is set in Ohio in 1880. The Civil War had been won, slavery had been abolished, but the memory of slavery still remains. Although the story itself is fictional, the novel is based on real events. The events are based on the Cincinnati trial of Margaret Garner, who with her husband and seventeen other slaves (Kentuckians) crossed into Ohio where they supposedly found safe haven. When it was discovered that they had been pursued and surrounded, and her husband overwhelmed, Margaret knew that any hope of freedom was in vain. He refused to see his children returned to slavery. Without delay, Margaret quickly grabbed a butcher's knife that was lying on a table and slit her young daughter's throat. She then attempted to kill her other children as well, then herself, but was overpowered and restrained before she could follow through. She was arrested and tried on the grounds that the child she had killed was legally the owner's property. In Beloved, when a new owner takes control of Sweet Home (the slave farm), Sethe escapes the brutal beatings she now suffers in an attempt to get from Kentucky to Ohio. When the pr......middle of paper......took part in the holocaust he had no other choice. They had families to take care of and home lives just like the rest of us. For example, I believe that many of the soldiers who took part in the Holocaust were forced out of military responsibility or risked betrayal or death. These soldiers have to live with themselves knowing they killed millions of innocent people. When an order is given, an order must be followed. Many soldiers had no choice but to kill or be killed. We are all human beings. We all have feelings and families we love. Sometimes the force behind the brutality is too powerful to disobey and the people (the soldiers, the white man, the Americans and Hiroshima, etc. etc.) have no choice but to obey or face the consequences. In the military you don't question an order; you just do it (as in Othello and Billy Budd).