Mans Search for Meaning

140020015
Summary
This book talks about the expected wearing down and unexpected
sustenance of certain human traits and mentality through forced attrition.
An individuals mentality and the flip-side his spirituality get affected by
the brutality of the regime imposed on him and a person either breaks
down or gets through by his character and/or willingness to live for his
loved ones. The book wants us to have a deeper understanding of human
will and psychology.
Thoughts
My first reaction on this reading this book was that we cant even begin to
imagine the torment and suffrage a common man went through during
the world war. We have the idea about a general suffering but to see the
small picture, the suffering ,in context of just one normal person makes
me shudder even more.
While reading the book there was a peculiar urgency in completing it, I
usually tend to read faster as the end approaches but in this read I
couldn't invest myself out of the book even as the cruelty unfolded page
by page to an unbearable extent. I think this was on account of it being a
real life story ,not an open-close sorry feeling story you could forget
about, and the author does have a genuineness while writing this book to
make us know and understand that human strive and love can exist even
through constant attack and prejudice and to look for a deeper meaning in
our disparate lives.
Passing any kind of judgement on the changes in behaviour of an
individual in the concentration camp is futile as we cant begin to imagine
the kind of atrocities these ordinary people had to face and survive
through those odds. The author lived through these hardships and has a
much better understanding of the psychologies evolved in the camp. The
author did remark on this particular aspect and hoped he could give a
sense of the human psychology developed in the camps to both the
outside people and the prisoners who survived to give them a handle on
what happened to them in the camp. He remarked on inner life taking a
hit to its lowest to

its most primitive level ,regression in a prisoners mental state. He has

talked about the psychological levels and the reaction of the prisoner who
is at that particular state. The prisoner usually had a huge impact on his
self-worth his ego per se as he logged more and more months in the camp
till he was a mere shadow of his former self . If a prisoner would ever get
liberated ,like the author, he would also be freed from his former self, a
wholly disparate, different person.
Analogy
There was and hopefully will not be a perfect analogy in my life to the dire
situation of the people stuck in the concentration camps but here is how it
applies to me.. The biggest psychological change that ever happened to
me has to be the moment when I transitioned from an average schoolgoer to an IIT aspirant .The change in workload was tremendous and
having a casual attitude would be highly detrimental to my ambitions. But
just as in the book there were levels from frustration to mild hope to just
giving up to freedom aka passing the entrance test. Its not even
comparable to the prisoners situation as it was something I could get out
from and they obviously could not but it has a similar unfolding of
experiences as mentioned by the author. A rollercoaster ride that changed
me inside out ..
They say the world is a beautiful place and worth fighting for. At the end
the freed prisoners, probably only believed in the second part. . . .