An Analysis Of Elie Wiesel's Night

While his father is dying in his bed, Elie decides to give him his own ration of bread of soup. However, after doing this a man in the camp says, “I’ll give you a sound piece of advice--don’t give your ration of bread and soup to your old father. There’s nothing you can do for him. And you’re killing yourself.” (pg. 115) . At this point in the book Elie himself realised that by helping and staying with his family made him go through much more hassle than what was necessary. After his dad passed Elie thought, “I might perhaps have found something like--free at last!” (pg. 116). He gathered that his father was keeping him from making the most of plight

The one person in Elie’s life that means everything to him is his father. During his time in the concentration camps, Elie’s bond with his father

When Elie and his family are sent to a concentration camp, he is fortunate enough to not be separated from his father. At first, this is a relief, and is father is his will to survive. “The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist. To no longer feel the excruciating pain of my foot… My father’s presence was the only thing that stopped me. He was running next to me, out of breathe, out of strength, desperate. I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his sole support.”(86)

Wiesel appeals to logos, ethos, and pathos in Night. The reader’s logic is not so much directly appealed to, but indirectly

Elie first recalls Dr. Mengele’s “eight short, simple words” (Wiesel 27) when he enters the camps: “Men to the left! Women to the right!” (Wiesel 27) In this part of the book, Elie and his father are separated by his mother and sisters. This metaphorically kills Elie because he is very attached to his family as are they to him. A piece of Elie has been taken away from him forever. Later in his memoir, he mentions the cruel hanging of the Pipel. Previous hangings that day did not phase Elie, but when the young, angelic Pipel was hanged, Elie said his once flavorful soup “tasted of corpses.” A man near Elie was saying “Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: “Where is He? Here He is- He is hanging here on this gallows…”(Wiesel 62) This is a powerful quote that shows how Elie has also began to question his faith. This brings about the mindset of the death of God in Elie. Elie begins to show distrust and rebellion in his God. This is a sharp contrast to Elie’s former beliefs. When Elie’s father dies, Elie emotionally shuts his mind off. He says “After my father’s death, nothing could touch me anymore.” He had finally given up. His father was his rock tied to the balloon, his reason to keep going. Without his father, Elie gave up and became zombified like the rest of the broken souls. Elie fully turned into the emotionless man that he was set to become as a result of surviving

Emphasizing the word ‘me,’ Elie shows himself gradually being consumed by the mindset of ‘every man for himself.’ He worries about his safety more than his father’s pain, and this continues after the officer leaves. His father called out to him again but Elie didn’t move, even when the officer disappeared, he only looked at his father, no aim to help his father and finally returns to his bunk to sleep. When he awoke the following day, his father was gone and Elie states, “deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last! …,” (112). Here, Elie admits that somewhere deep down inside him, he felt released from the responsibility of looking after his father, although pained by his death, relieved of a burden. Deep down he harbored the feeling that his father was just another thing to add to the list of his trouble and

This quote is making you feel for Elie and his father because you want to have pity on his father but you also want to feel the way Elie does because his father has caused him so much pain.

“I woke from my apathy only when two men approached my father. I threw myself on his body. He was cold. I slapped him. I rubbed his hands, crying... At last, my father half opened his eyes” (99). Elie almost lost the one thing that kept him going, his father. He had gone all this way, enduring so many different trials and awful things. He was not going to let his father give up now like most of the other people around them. Elie would not let him be like the other ones that were thrown off. “In a snowy field in Poland, hundreds of naked orphans without a tomb” (99). Elie was not going to abandon his father like

:After witnessing his friend’s death, Elie started to let the idea of death consume his thoughts to the point that, if his father had not been by his side serving as motivation, he would have died that night during the march. “Death enveloped me, it suffocated me, It stuck to me like glue.”

After marching outside in the freezing weather for days, Elie’s father starts to sleep in the convoy. During his sleep, two “gravediggers” enter the convoy and assume that Elie’s father, Shlomo Wiesel, is dead and they try to throw him out to make room. Elie refuses to believe that his father is dead and desperately tries to wake him up, throwing himself at his body (99). Elie goes into great detail how he tried to wake his father up, saying “I slapped him. I rubbed his hands, crying” and “I started to hit him harder and harder. At last, my father half opened his eyes” (99). Without Elie being there to wake his father up, Shlomo would have been thrown outside in the cold, left to die. Later on, when Elie’s father is deathly ill with dysentery, Elie takes the role of a caregiver and helps his father live a little longer. He would take his father back to his cot and help him lie down (109). Elie also starts to give his father extra rations of bread and water even though deep down, Elie knows it won’t help cure his father from his illness. Every time Elie’s dad pleaded for water, Elie knew “that he must not drink. But he pleaded with me so long that I gave in” (110). Mr. Wiesel relied on Elie more than ever at this time in his life to help him stay alive for one more day even though his future was bleak. Although Shlomo was getting weaker by the day, he needed Elie, his only son, to stay with him and help

Dementia and physical illness rendered him too weak to rely on, so rather than asking how Elie would live without his father, a new question was presented: How would his father live without Elie? Immediately after arriving to a liberation camp, the surviving prisoners were divided into various groups, so Elie grabbed his father’s hand and refused to let go. Unfortunately, exposure to such unforgiving environments had introduced Elie’s father to the kind of seductive release from pain mentioned earlier. This was confirmed through an argument the two had where Elie refused to let his father sleep, knowing quite well he wouldn’t wake up. However, the latter was obstinate, begging to rest because he was so unbearably weak. The one-sided quarrel caused Elie to admit, “I knew that I was no longer arguing with him but with Death itself, with Death that he had already chosen” (105). Elie had previously demonstrated the strength to fight for his life, because that was what survival was, a fight. However, his father was not as fortunate, and didn’t possess the same willpower as his

Firstly, the words of characters are essential in displaying this theme through the quotes of two characters, a young French woman, and also Elie himself. The first compassionate quote occurs after Elie is maliciously assaulted by Idek, a Kapo who has episodic outbursts of fury. After the onslaught subsides, the French woman acknowledges a distraught Elie, and attempts to console Elie by saying, “Bite your lips, little brother... Don 't cry” (Wiesel, 53). In this statement, the French woman utilizes empathy for Elie to overcome her fear of speaking to Elie, visibly shown through the quote “I knew she wanted to talk to me but that she was paralyzed with fear” (Wiesel, 53), through compassion, consequently enabling her to feel an urge to ease Elie 's suffering and calms Elie

“My father’s presence was the only thing that stopped me”(Wiesel pg 84). Elie was on the verge of dying and his father came and ran by his side and kept him going. Without his father being there to keep him going he would no longer be alive, this shows how much Elie needed his father. Elie and his father were being sent to another camp and, his father was beginning to slowly fade away. “Father! Father! Wake up. They’re trying to throw you out of the carriage”(Wiesel pg 94). He knew he wouldn’t be able to survive long without his father. He didn’t want to know what it was like not to have a father. When he realized his dad might be dead on the train he then realized how much indeed he needed his dad. “Come here! Come quickly! There’s someone strangling my son.”(Wiesel pg 97) His father yelled this at Meir Katz to help Elie because he was too weak. Elie’s father couldn’t help him but, he wanted his son to live and he made sure to grab help from someone else because he didn’t want his son to die. Elie towards the end of the book was taking care more of his father then of his own self. He was giving all his food to his dad to strengthen him. “You ought to be having to rations of bread, two rations of soup.”(Wiesel pg 105) Elie was told to stop giving his father all his rations but, he couldn’t bear to see his father like he was. He was

He rarely displayed his feeling, not even within his family, and was more involved with the welfare of others than with his own kin” (Wiesel 4). His father never showed emotion, so when he did everyone else knew something was severely wrong. His dad really cared about Elie and wanted the best for him. It was like not wanting to watch the family dog that everyone grew up with being laid down. Nobody wants to have to bear

Night Essay “It’s the end. God is no longer with us.” (Wiesel, page 83) Within the book Night by Elie Wiesel.