Boudinot's "The Littlest Hitler"

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Boudinot's The Littlest Hitler follows a young boy who decided to dress up as Hitler for Halloween. As expected, he runs into a few problems, most notably the moment when he realized a girl in his class dressed as Anne Frank. As I was reading the story, the protagonist's father showed more and more indications of being unqualified to be a father and lacking empathy. He seems to wholeheartedly support the decision to go to school dressed as Hitler. The fact that he was divorced indicated that his child would likely have issues regarding mental stability in the future. At the end, when the protagonist sticks his arm into the fire, it is an accurate representation of what many of us desire to do when we make mistakes. We seek to empathize and understand the pain of those that the mistake has offended. His act of self harm by burning his arm was an allusion to the way the Jewish prisoners in German concentration camps were cremated after they were killed. An event from my life that induced empathy was when I inadvertently offended someone else in my class in second grade. Although the consequences were not nearly as severe as the mistake in The Littlest Hitler, it was a mistake nonetheless. During our wood shop and technology class, my friends and I were discussing how we were annoyed by hypocrisy with a few others at our table. I asked her if she knew what hypocrisy meant, because she looked genuinely confused. She knew what it meant, but she seemed offended for some reason. Her friends told me that she was crying after class because she thought that the fact that I assumed she didn't know what hypocrisy is indicated that I thought she was stupid. Obviously I had been insulted before, so I felt a substantial amount of empathy about the event. Because of how accurately The Littlest Hitler depicts a mistake with terrible repercussions as a result of an insensitive father and likely a rough upbringing, I would give it four out of five stars.

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