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" The most horrible thing is not physical suffering,
but what this pain has caused in ordinary men

Primo Levi

Writing styles

Primo Levi

Throughout his book, Primo Levi uses a neutral tone as he reports the horrible facts of a mass killing of innocents. It is written Auschwitz and the life one does not have there without totally rejecting the cruelty of the Nazis. Hatred is personal, directed against a person, a face; however, our persecutors had no name, no face, they were distant, invisible, inaccessible. It therefore alternates the 'I' of the t moin making the reader a spectator of his story with a post laughing 'we' forcing us to feel concerned about it, r fl chir.

Robert Antelme

Robert Antelme, as for him, uses an ironic tone since he adopts the SS identity. From this way it shows and the absurdity of their statements. His son, Jeunesse Hitl rienne, today wears the uniform with the dagger and the armlet cross gamm e. He limps a little, stiffened. He has a small, uncanny mouth and a hairless asshole. We have rarely seen one as beautiful. He adopts a crude and realistic writing that uses colloquial, vulgar language. Some of his 'words' are frank and you cut with his collar.



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Charlotte Delbo

Unlike these two men, Charlotte Delbo adopts a more poetic genre with free proses and verses. She rarely uses the 'I' because the 'we' and the 'one' express the universality of misfortune, of suffering: 'Did you know that in the morning we want to die / That in the evening we are afraid,' 'They put our souls naked in front of us.' The 'you' is also used to accuse the reader, to make him guilty: 'O you who know', 'What tears will you have', 'Will you weep'.

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Conclusion

Although their styles are different, these three crivains report with just as much movement on life in the camps. Their methods of writing do not have the same impact on the readers: thus some will be influenced by the poetry of Charlotte Delbo, others by the poetry of Robert Antelme or even the neutralit of Primo Levi. Well if there are many other ways to write down the horror of the camps, to talk, to tell, to mock you.