Elie and Lauren

Elie and Lauren rely on their faith to bring about a sense of home. When Lauren and Elie's sense of home is destroyed their faith is challenged, forcing them to adapt to their new environment. Their new environment was nothing like what they had previously thought of as home. Throughout their challenges they come to realize that they only needed one thing to make home for themselves, and that was their faith.

Lauren anticipated the destruction of her home and community, so she had preparation prior to the occurrence. She devises a plan plotting how she would go about surviving outside of her home. When Lauren is forced into a strange new world filled with constant threats, she relies on her faith. She does this because her faith is the only thing that is familiar to her. Her father was a minister but she did not fully believe in his views, and because of this she created her own religion to help describe the world around her in a way that she could understand. Lauren believes that her father's religion requires people to rely on God to get through struggles, while she believes that people must make things happen for themselves and prepare for any negative changes that could occur. Lauren does not believe in God as a person, she believes in God as a type of process, the process of change, because change is the only constant thing in life. Since Laurens God is a process it does not act against anyone in particular. She once writes: " God is neither good/nor evil/neither loving/ nor hating" (Butler, p.245). Lauren believes that if you don't respect change, change will come unexpectedly, and people will not know how to respond. Her faith guides her through the outside world to try to find a place to start home. She views Bankhole's land as great place to start a new home because she can shape a community there based on her faith. Faith is the only thing that is familiar when everything else is changing. In this way she always had a home.

Lauren did not have a great amount of trust in people at the beginning of the story. This was a part of her personality that stayed the same right after her home was destroyed. However, after she was outside the walls of her community she was forced to be in close proximity with people she did not know or trust. With no family she began to stick her neck out to start helping people even though she knew it could be dangerous. This was a change for her because it takes some amount of trust to do this; more trust than she had ever had to give to a person with whom she was not familiar. This was due to the fact that she had always been accustomed to having a family. Once her family was gone she needed to find a new one to survive, because part of home is having a family, and she was trying to create a new home. Although her home and community was destroyed Lauren's faith was strong and she adapted to the changes. Her faith led her to create a new home because her faith was based on adaptation and survival. If you were without a home in the world she was living in, you probably wouldn't survive for long. No matter where Lauren goes, if her faith and family are with her, she can adapt to change.

Unlike Lauren, Elie lived in a normal town, had a normal family, and a normal community. He did not live in a dystopia and because of this Elie never anticipated the destruction of his home and community. He was not prepared mentally or physically for something like the holocaust to happen. At the age of only 13 he did not have much time to think about anything like this ever occurring, which also gave him a major disadvantage in being prepared for disaster. Before the holocaust, Elie's religion was his life: he lived for his religion, and everything he did was based on his religion. That is all he knew and it is what he enjoyed. Elie believed that his God was the master of the universe, and therefore controlled everything. All of this changed when he was thrown into the holocaust. For the first time he experienced the evil side of humanity, in a way that was almost unimaginable to him. He witnessed thousands of people being burned, people being hung, and babies being killed, and all of this was because of his religion that he took so seriously. This was very confusing to him, he