Affirmation of Humanity in 3 Books

Number Our Days, and The Slave Community

Rodolfo Byers, the white trader in the Pueblo community, realizes at the end of Frank Waters' The Man Who Killed The Deer that "[t]he brotherhood of man! It will always be a dreary phrase, a futile hope, until each man, all men, realize that they themselves are but different reflections and insubstantial images of a greater invisible whole" (Waters 199). Martiniano, the moral center of The Man Who Killed The Deer, only comes to this realization after being continually pulled between adherence to tribal and traditional rituals and beliefs, and the lure of his "away-school" training and the emphasis on individuality recognized by the European Romantic tradition he learned at the away-school.

In Number Our Days, Shmuel acts largely as this moral center. He also is somewhat of an outcast from the group with which he is affiliated because he questions the morality of Zionism. The Slave Community follows no particular person, and therefore has no real moral center per se, other than the current repugnance toward slavery. Nonetheless, even here, despite the obvious dehumanization and demoralization of the slaves in the furtherance of slavery, Blassingame observes moments of the slaves' tenacity in affirming their humanity.

The issues of individuality, humanity and the group subculture raised in the fictional The Man Who Killed Th

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by external forces, the subjects could fall back on their beliefs to form a united front. But when no external threat existed, members would perhaps begin to question the validity of their beliefs. Nonetheless, as with Martiniano and the Pueblo Indians, much of the strength of the Jewish people in Myerhoff's study lay in their ability to face adversity while maintaining their humanity. They triumph over their persecution by proving, in the end, that they can live and love like everybody else. They prove that, despite the attempt by their persecutors to portray them as otherwise, they live their lives according to their beliefs and these beliefs operate to affirm life: "In the [Graduation-Syium] ritual, they exercised their basic human prerogative, the right to indicate who they are to the world, to interpret themselves to themselves instead of allowing accident, history, and reality to make that interpretation for them" (Myerhoff 108). More so than in either of the other two works, John Blassingame's The Slave Community relies most strongly on group solidarity as evidence of the affirmation of humanity. In the other works, we are given an outcast of sorts (Martiniano and Shmuel) who allows a definition of the group while s
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2004
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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