set of striped pajamas behind a barbed wire fence

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

by John Boyne

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Student Question

Why was Bruno unsatisfied with his father's advice to accept his situation?

Quick answer:

Bruno is unsatisfied with his father's advice to accept his situation because it is inadequate in the face of a moral outrage like the Holocaust. While Bruno doesn't fully grasp this, he senses something is wrong. His father's advice to accept and do nothing reflects the passive complicity that allowed atrocities like Auschwitz to occur. Although not depicted as evil, Bruno's father is involved in an evil task, troubling both him and Bruno.

Expert Answers

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In chapter 5 of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Bruno is dissatisfied with his father's advice because, in the circumstances, it is profoundly unsatisfactory. It may be good advice to accept the situation in which you find yourself when the problem is a minor inconvenience but not when it is a moral outrage.

Bruno does not understand, as most readers will, that his father is telling him to accept the Holocaust. However, throughout the novel, he always senses that something is wrong. His father is cold and undemonstrative but really loves Bruno, and he is not depicted as an evil man. However, there can be no question that he is performing an evil task, and the sense that this is the case bothers both him and Bruno.

A comment that is often made about the Holocaust is one which was first formulated a long time before it occurred, in an 1867 speech by John Stuart Mill:

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.

The advice that Bruno's father gives him is essentially to look on and do nothing, and it is because so many people actually took this advice that Auschwitz was able to function and genocide was permitted to happen.

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