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Critical Lens


             "Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world. It makes us more sensitive to the world, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds." This quote written by an unknown author is very true. If you read literature and really soak it up, you can learn a great deal from it. Two books that demonstrate this are To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee and Night, by Elie Wiesel.
             To Kill a Mockingbird takes place in Maycomb Alabama in the 1930s. The protagonist of the novel is Scout Finch. She is a curious young girl whose father is a respected lawyer named Atticus. This novel opens up people's eyes to what small towns were like in the 1930s. It shows you how people lived and how the town ran. On top of the social ladder were the wealthy townspeople. Then came the middle class, that's where the Finch family fell. Next on the ladder came poor white people. In the novel an example of the poor whites is the Ewell family. They were a very poor family that lived by the town dump. Last on the social ladder were the African Americans.
             To Kill a Mockingbird informs the reader of the unfair treatment of African Americans during this time period. The novel shows this through the major conflict of the story, the trial of Tom Robinson. Tom is an African American man who is wrongly accused of raping a poor white woman named Mayella Ewell. Atticus proves that Tom is innocent, but he is still sent to jail because of the town's prejudice against African Americans. .
             The novel Night is set in Romania in the 1940s, but during the course of the novel the setting changes to Poland. It is set during World War Two. The protagonist is Elie Weisel who is also the author of the book, which makes the novel told in first person point of view. Elie and his family are deported to a concentration camp in Poland. The author uses a lot of imagery to show how horrible the conditions at this camp truly were.


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