Apart from its role as a defensive mechanism, the prisoners' apathy was also the result of other factors. Hunger and lack of sleep contributed to it (as they do in normal life, also) and to the general irritability which was another characteristic of the prisoners' mental state.
This ie partially where he looks at their forced subhuman conditions from a doctor's perspective, and how badly the situation could affect ones mental health and general well-being
Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will and had made him an object to be exterminated (having planned, however, to make full use of him first—to the last ounce of his physical resources)— under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values. If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value.
This is one of the most important parts of the book to me. It explains in detail what the experience of concentration camps and gas chambers were. It additionally is really chilling...
You done lived wid me for twenty years and you don’t half know me atall.
The topic that generally stood out to me the most was the concept of marriage in the book. For Janie, she was somewhat pressured to get married, under the assumption of ‘you will be safe if you have a husband, and love always comes eventually through marriage.’ It's a sadly unrealistic idea. She was waiting for a love that never came. Her husband was abusive, and unreasonable, even meeting death he was bitter. After chapter eight, she was free. It wasn’t just about Jody’s death. It was about an end. The end. Or actually, her new beginning. The start of her freedom.When she burned all of her head rags, that was when she put down her burden of being married to him. She could start anew. It wasn’t the death of something. It was the birth of her freedom. The book signified how she felt after she did that, even after the funeral.
In my final project, I wanted to portray how her marriages in some way held her down, but then also set her free. Her marriages with Jody and Logan really messed her up, but when she was with tea cake, she was happier. Even if for not that long. Tea Cake had some problems, but he wasn’t abusive, and he loved her. She never fell in love again, as far as we know, after his death. For the piece of artwork I made, it basically consists of 4 characters from the story, and two important locations or things that were significant to Janie in the book. There are two cliffs on each side, one on the left has Janie hanging off the ledge of it. It's supposed to symbolize how they trapped her, b/c her first two husbands are on that same cliff, depicted as sihollutes. On the second cliff (right side) it has Tea Cake, waiting for her, and the tree, from the beginning of the book, that is the only ‘real’ source of color and life in the work. The tree itself is a mixed shaded blend of blue and green, and the trunk is light brown. However, the rest of the artwork is faded light blue, light gray, etc. to represent torrential winds. At the bottom of the two cliffs, is the hurricane. She has to jump ‘over’ it to Tea Cake, and just general safety. The hurricane represents everything ‘bad’ that happened to her in the book, but also how she overcame it. How it made her a better person. Or to be more specific, how each marriage, or event changed her personality, perspective, and her disposition on so many things/topics. Like marriage: going into her first marriage she thought that by default, love comes with marriage. It doesn’t. Not always. It can, but is also unlikely, and probably not the most desirable thing. Janie’s previous two husbands in my artwork are represented as shadows, because they’re shadows of her past, and people that made her unhappy, sad, or were abusive to her. The shadows represent those two specifically, but the hurricane essentially everything else that went wrong, as I mentioned before. Another reason why I had the cliffs in the artwork is because, not only was Janie falling, and trapped, but she was running away. She ran away from Jody to be with Logan, and then eventually Logan died. She didn’t run away from Logan necessarily, but she didn't stay long after he died. Through her turbulent journey of her whole life, she found and realized things that she wouldn't have known before without the choices she made at the time. For example, near the beginning of the book she was talking about how nanny was pressuring her to get married, every since she kissed a boy for the first time. In retrospect, it almost makes sense why nanny was so hurried: their family had a history of rape, and she was dying and wanted to see Janie well off in life. Although it didn’t work out as well, she can now speak from experience about multiple concepts she did not understand.
(Final Project link) https://i.imgur.com/91dnk4k.png