World Literature Essay

World Literature Essay

A young boy who tries to survive the Holocaust, a king who sleeps with his mother and kills his father, and a brave man who is unable to reveal his love for a women, these are the stories that three different books tell, written by authors coming from all over Europe. These works of literature namely are "Night", "Oedipus the King" and "Cyrano de Bergerac". All three of these stories appear to be rather dissimilar since they are written and take place during time periods which lie thousands of years apart. "Oedipus the King" is a legendary story which takes place hundreds before the birth of Christ and contrasting to this play are "Cyrano de Bergerac" and "Night" which in comparison to Oedipus are new, since they have only been published in roughly the last 100 years. Not only are the time periods and the topics of these pieces of literature varied but also the types of the works are different with Oedipus and Cyrano being plays and "Night" being written as a memoir. Nonetheless, these pieces have more similarities than one at first might imagine, due to the fact they deal with identical themes that have moved, inspired and provoked people to think over many millennia. "Oedipus the King", "Cyrano de Bergerac" and "Night" all discuss the themes of fear, love and the limits of the free will, however, the themes are incorporated in a variety of different ways in each of these pieces, creating powerful emotions and a strong feeling of empathy in the reader.
Fear is one of the most commonly used themes in literature because the audience can easily identify with the characters since everyone at sometime has experienced this intense emotion and this is also one of the reasons for which all of these pieces of World Literature have used and included the theme of fear through out their stories. "Night" is the book in which fear plays the most important role of all the three pieces, since it is told by a Holocaust survivor, who tells his horrible...