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The purpose of this study is to read the protagonists, an unnamed boy in The Painted Bird written by Jerzy Kosinski and Ruth Puttermesser in Puttermesser Papers written by Cynthia Ozick, as ‘subjects resisting violent reality’ through tracing their desire to preserve life, internal struggle, and division. The Painted Bird is a picaresque novel that reflects the autobiographical elements of Kosinski, who was born in Poland and experienced World War II and the Holocaust. In this work, an unnamed boy was forcibly separated from his parents and lost his ability to speak due to bullying and torture by the inhabitants of a rural Slave village. However, after the war, he reunited with his ailing parents in an orphanage in Poland and found his own voice and self. In Puttermesser Papers, Ozick describes Ruth’s life and afterlife. Ruth is a Jewish woman who was discriminated against and excluded in American society. Yet she tried to realize her Jewish self in American society and succeeded as a lawyer and politician. Unfortunately, she was raped and killed by a trespassing robber. This study examines the origins of violence utilizing Rene Girard’s scapegoat violence or victim production mechanism and Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘homo sacer,’ and tries to analyze the aspects of violence represented by the two writers, particularly ‘Consensual Collective Violence’ inflicted on an unknown boy in the remote Polish countryside in the context of World War II and the Holocaust in The Painted Bird, and ‘Daily Indiscriminate Violence,’ that is, rape and murder, in New York in Puttermesser Papers. This study reveals that the unnamed boy in The Painted Bird has a strong desire for survival, and Ruth in Puttermesser Papers acquires subjectivity and identity by resisting violent reality through the internalization of Jewish tradition. Furthermore, this paper tries to seek a deeper understanding of human nature and find desirable individuals, groups, and societies for coexistence, through the analysis of these two works which represent different forms of violence.