This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen Literary Elements

Autobiography, non-fiction

The setting of the book is at Nazi Germany whereby the narrator is in a concentration camp in Auschwitz.

The narrator is in the first person. He was enslaved in Auschwitz and he was bitter because of the mistreatment that the Jews and Polish got from Nazi Germany.

The tone of the book is a sombre tone for the narrator narrates of human suffering at Auschwitz. The mood is a melancholy one as the reader sympathizes with the inhumane conditions that people were subjected to at Auschwitz.

The protagonists of the book are those that were killed, harrased and overworked by Nazi Germany. The antagonist of the novel is Nazi Germany for it mistreated Jewish people and other races because the regime considered them inferior.

The major conflict in the novel is the mistreatment, killing and overworking of the Jewish people at Auschwitz.

The climax is arrived at when a battalion of Allied forces get to Auschwitz and they rescued all those who were enslaved there and stopped the mass murder of people.

Tadek had told Becker that there would be a selection(people who worked at the camp were selected for death at certain times) and that he(Becker) would be selected. Thia came to pass when Becker was selected for death at the gas chambers.

The narrator asked, 'How many have gone so far?' This was about the people who had been killed in the gas chambers. The narrator's question was an understatement of the killing that was done in the gas chambers.

The narrator alludes to Velasquez's painting when he writes a letter to his girlfriend saying, '... your perfume and your robes heavy and red like the brocades in Velasquez's painting.'

The description of the little girl who wa the daughter of the manager of Auschwitz. The narrator describes her and her surroundings as, ' On the steps of the veranda, shaded with dark-green Ivy, a little girl is playing with a big sulky dog.' The narration contains visual imagery that has been built through the use of adjectives such as big and little.

The narrator says regarding the prisoners of Auschwitz, '... they walked around in a daze like living corpses.' This is a paradoxical statement for the narrator claims that the people walked around like the dead and the dead cannot walk.

The narrator draws a parallel between daytime and nighttime at Auschwitz. He says that the days were unbearably hot whereas the night were cool and clear.

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