History and Memory in Life is Beautiful

In Scott Ryan’s text History and Memory in Life is Beautiful he talks about the movie Life is Beautiful and how the protagonist, Guido, gives the movies a very fictional feel in a real setting. The world he tries to create for himself and his son, Joshua, is a very positive world; he views everything with a positive aspect. Even after Guido and his son got caught he still played it off to Joshua that everything will be fine and that the bus ride and the death camps were all apart of a game for his birthday. The reason for lying like that is to protect his own son so he doesn’t freak out. In a way, his text shows that you should relate to one another in always a positive way, although what Guido does may not be the best way to go through life. It is good to make the best situation possible out of a bad situation but sometimes, especially in the realities of the harsh camps, you need to realize reality and take things from there instead of pushing the bad to the side. I believe the text is straightforward about the values it proposes, considering in the second page of the text he says “the extreme barbarity or Nazism and Fascism acts as a backdrop to the narrative’s central premise that to see beauty in even the most heinous conditions is to triumph over evil.” I believe these values he talks about are very natural, because it is good to make good out of bad, but to deny to someone the realities of what’s going on is not always the best idea.