Both the narrator and ellison are hiding in different ways within their book. levy keeps a lot of things away from us, but you have the feeling that there's some limit to how much he can reveal about himself. A, now, there's that dum. I just don't want to miss this scene. There's a scene where he, he gets this incredibly great bit of good fortune. And he and a number of the prisoners who um hewants a book. So it's not of video, we see them in our mind's eye, but there are some beautiful women in that office. He looks like a bag of bones, and he's filthy and numb. But
In his memoir of his time in Auschwitz, Primo Levi describes Jewish prisoners bathing in freezing water without soap--not because they thought it would make them cleaner, but because it helped them hold on to their dignity. For poet and author Dwayne Betts, Levi's description of his fellow inmates' suffering, much like the novelist Ralph Ellison's portrayal of early twentieth-century black life in America, is much more than bearing witness to the darkest impulses of mankind. Rather, Betts tells EconTalk host Russ Roberts, both authors' writing turns experiences of inhumanity into lessons on what it means to be a human being.