Logotherapy In Man's Search For Meaning

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl’s use of diction, syntax, tone, and imagery throughout this first-hand account is thorough, serious, and sarcastic at some points. However, it lacks the horrific imagery of concentration camps during the Holocaust to make the point of how his life there led to his success of Logotherapy more straightforward.
The diction within Frankl’s book shows many degrading words said by the Capos, they oversaw the inmates barracks, towards him and the other inmates. The word choices do switch throughout the memoir; from degrading to sarcasm and then to medical terminology towards the end. At the beginning, Frankl explains his life in the concentration camps, in which the inmates were treated like anything besides a human being. The degrading diction used was to show the …show more content…
The inmates were called “pigs” and this made them feel as if they were living a “life of a number” (43 & 73). The “life of a number” was referring to the numbers tattooed on them. The reason they had tattooed numbers was so that the guards could keep a record of who's who but the inmates were never referred to by name, only by number. From the inmates point of view, the reader should understand that “it [wasn’t] the physical pain which hurt the most…; it [was] the mental agony caused by injustice, the unreasonableness of it all” (42). The use of Frankl’s degrading diction is to display the corrupt atmosphere the inmates felt around them during their life in the concentration camp. Every so often, the degrading word choice, transitions into the use of sarcasm. Frankl uses sarcasm in the description of life in the concentration camps is to allow the reader to understand the irony of what some things were like there. For example, when the inmates were on their “last days” they were allowed to ‘“enjoy”’the days by smoking a cigarette (26). For an inmate they had no