Byebye Blog Posts

   Final blog post y'all, even though a lot of people don't really read my posts anyway... (tears). Let us start.
   In chapter 8, it's about Elie trying to keep his father alive and feeling guilty when thoughts of abandoning his father cross his mind. At the start of the chapter, Elie's father was getting really weak and kept wanting to rest, while Elie keeps arguing with him, or since he's grown so irrational it's more like he's arguing with Death, to get and stay alive. After his father got dysentery, it was a matter of time before he died, but Elie still kept trying, even though he knew the logical choice was to end his father's suffering. He would feel guilt and shame whenever thoughts like those crossed his mind, and he would feel like Rabbi Eliahu's son, that he had not passed the test of staying with his father until the end. On his last night alive, he's calling to Elie, and Elie does nothing. His father's last words are his son's name. When Elie woke up the next morning, his father was gone, carried to the crematories sometime during the night or before dawn. He died on January 26, 1945, just months away from the war ending and being freed. Elie didn't weep for his father; he was out of tears, and he knew that if he searched deep in his conscience, he would have found the feeling of something like being freed at last.
   Elie's father's death is really sad because that is just months away from the war being over and everyone being freed. If Elie's father could've held out for another five months or so, he could've lived. We should appreciate Elie's honesty throughout the book; he easily could have lied about everything he did that we would consider inhumane, and no one would have known. Instead, we're able to read about what actually happened at the concentration camps. We should be thankful, or something, to Elie for telling the truth, because all of it must've been hard for him to admit, and that he deeply regrets. If we were put in Elie's position with his father slowly dying, we would've had a difficult time deciding too. Either decision he made, his father was going to physically be in a bad place: suffering, or death. Everything that Elie's said in the book has just been a little glance at what life at a concentration was like. The decisions, beatings, work, and living conditions they were under we would consider unfathomable, but Elie lived through it all and told his story.
   Since this is the last ever blog post that we're ever doing, I just wanna appreciate all the book units we've ever done in Mr. Boyle's class, including seventh grade. Especially this year, I'm really going to miss Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Christmas Carol, and Night (Wait Till Next Year is a little debatable). I've loved every book units in seventh and eighth grade and learned a lot from all of them. I'm really going to miss reading them in Mr. Boyle's class and having the section quizzes, because I know high school does it differently. Byebye blog posts, and goodbye book units.