Analysis Of Night By Elie Wiesel Essay

This shows Elie’s change in his thoughts on God and having faith. At the beginning of the story, Elie strives to be a spiritual kid and is fascinated by learning about God. He goes behind his father's back to learn about God with Moishe the Beadle, and has intense prayers everyday which he cries during. However, he becomes bitter towards God, angry about all the pain he has inflicted on the Jewish race. This change in perspective was brought on by the torture, abuse, and inhumane treatment by the Nazis. It causes Elie to question how God, who is supposed to be helpful and good, could ever allow such horror. This connects to loss, and how the traumatic

“I have not lost faith in God [despite] moments of anger and protest; sometimes I have been closer to him for that reason.” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel explains the struggle of his changing beliefs in God during the Holocaust in his memoir Night. In Night, Elie Wiesel, a religious boy, is taken to several concentration camps along with other Jews, and separated from everyone in his family except for his father. He and his father live dangerous lives in the concentration camps, from being beaten, watching other prisoners die, and being close to death, until eventually Elie’s father dies and the camp is liberated. As Elie Wiesel’s time in the Holocaust lengthens, his devoutness in God begins to diminish.

the horrific events in the concentration camp and the ever-present risk of death does Eliezer

Eliezer was taught that God is supposed to be filled with good, yet as he goes through the Holocaust, he thinks that maybe God doesn't exist at all . As he and his father are walking through Auschwitz, he sees the Nazi's burning babies in a large pit. While his father began whispering to himself the prayer for the dead, reciting "may his name be blessed and magnified...," Eliezer asks himself, thinking that he would be burned as well, "Why should I bless his name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe...was silent. What had I to thank him for?"(Page 31) This is the beginning of his lack of faith in god. As Eliezer and his father were together in Buna, an occasional public hanging would take place. Hangings were executed not only for those that committed a crime, but also for the prisoners of the camp, in order to learn a lesson from the accused. In Buna, one of three prisoners who were hung was a little boy, who was a servant of a member of the resistance group in the camp. Once the boy was publicly hung, the boy was still alive, just hanging there on the noose for about half an hour. As the prisoners in the camp were forced to watch the hanging, they began to cry. Eliezer said that even though there were so many hangings, this was the first time everyone was crying. At that moment, a prisoner asked out loud "Where is God now?"(Page 62) and Eliezer answered to himself "Where is he?

In the concentration camp Eliezer can’t understand why God allows so much death and destruction, and even though he is angry and questions God he never loses his faith. Although Eliezer never has his questions answered he never loses his faith. Eliezers evolving relationship with God is a major source of character development for himself.

Faith is like a little seed; if you think about the positive aspects of a situation, then it will grow, like a seed grows when you water it. However, if the seed does not receive water anymore, it will die, which serves as a parallel to the horrors and antagonism of the concentration camps that killed Elie’s faith. After the analysis of the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the reader can visualize the horrors and slaughter of millions of innocent people that occurred in concentration camps. Throughout the book, Wiesel explains how his faith in God was tested, as he was forced to leave his home, separated from his family, and observed the death all around him; he even witnessed children being thrown into huge ditches of fire alive. Elie felt abandoned, betrayed, and deceived by the God that he knew who was a loving and giving God. It was then he started to doubt His existence. Elie tried to hold on to his faith, but the childhood innocence had disappeared from within him, and he lost his faith in God completely.

One of the horrific moments that Eliezer went through is the time the small boy got hung and it took half an hour for him to die. “But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing… And so remained for more than half an hour…” (Weisel 65) This changed him a lot because he knew how brutal the world could be. It was also when he, along with quite a few others, started to lose faith in God. “Where is merciful God, where is He?... For God’s sake, where is God?... Where He is? This is where--hanging here from this gallows…” (Weisel 64,65) These things are said by other random Jews who are watching the scene of the hanging of the little boy. These people are losing faith in God because they are blaming Him for not being merciful on the Jews and the little boy. This is one of the most important parts of the change that Eliezer goes through. Sometimes, he doesn’t realize he has changed until he sees the change in himself.

Eliezer wanted to be very religious. He was anxious to learn more about the many different things of his religion towards the beginning of the book. When Eliezer and his family were brought to the death camps, he began to doubt about his faith. For instance, Eliezer watched with the rest, the hanging of a young child from the gallows."He remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes"(Wiesel 65). Eliezer says this because once they hung them, two men died instantly and the little boy was still breathing. A man behind Eliezer was asking where God was and Eliezer was thinking the same thing. This quote relates to Eliezer’s faith fading away because he saw the death of the boy as the death of his God, because if God let this happen to a child, with everyone there to see it, then the God that Eliezer once believed in probably doesn’t exist anymore. This act shows how innocent people died without help or a second

During his time in the concentration camps, Elie’s outlook on life shifted to a very pessimistic attitude, showing emotions and actions including rebellion, forgetfulness of humane treatment, and selfishness. Elie shows rebellion early in the Holocaust at the Solemn Service, a jewish ceremony, by thinking, “Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled” (Wiesel 67). Elie had already shifted his view on his religion and faith in God. After witnessing some of the traumas of the concentration camps, Elie questioned what he did to deserve such treatment. Therefore, he began to rebel against what he had grown up learning and believing. Not only had Elie’s beliefs changed, his lifestyle changed as well. When Elie’s foot swelled, he was sent to the doctor, where they put him “...in a bed with white sheets. I [he] had forgotten that people slept in sheets” (Wiesel 78). Many of the luxuries that Elie may have taken for granted have been stripped of their lives, leaving Elie and the other victims on a thin line between survival and death. By explaining that he forgot about many of these common luxuries, Elie emphasizes the inhumane treatment the victims of the Holocaust were put through on a daily basis.

From the start of the story, Elieser was a sincere Jew who studied Jewish tradition faithfully and believed faithfully in God. Even as the Jews were being deported, they expressed their faith in God to save them from the Nazis. To understand the Holocaust through the eyes of Eliezer, one must follow his path of lost faith in God. At Auschwitz, when he first spotted the furnace pits in which the babies burned, he began to doubt God. Eliezer asked himself, "Why should I bless His name? What had I to thank him for?" Eliezer at this point felt that God betrayed him because God was not there to stop the horrible events. With the lasting impact of that night, Eliezer went on to state, "Never shall I forget that night…which has turned my life into one long night…Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever…that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget this moments which murdered my God…Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself." That night was the turning point of Eliezer's faith in God. Eliezer told a story where two prisoners were suspected of being involved with a resistance along with a young boy, who was a servant of a resistance member. As the prisoners watched the child strangle on the end of the noose, they began to tear. One man even starts to wonder how God could be present in a world with

The boy struggled due to the non strategically placed rope. This sight caused confusion and fear among the prisoners. After Elie witnessed the awful hanging of his fellow peers, he lost all belief in the god he once worshipped. “And in spite of myself, a prayer formed inside me, a prayer to god in whom I no longer believed.” (Wiesel,67)

On the Jewish New Year, Elie feels a strong rebellion against God. He becomes the accuser and God the accused. But in his rebellion against his faith in God, he also feels alone and empty. The Jews debate whether they should fast for Yom Kippur. As an act of obedience to his father and also as an act of rebellion against God, Elie swallows his food. In the camps, his physical needs become more important than his faith. Elie and his father manage to survive through the selection process, where the unfit are condemned to the crematory. Elie suffers from a foot injury that places him in a hospital. As Elie recuperates in the hospital after his foot surgery, a faceless neighbor tells him that he has more faith in Hitler than in anyone else because he's the only one who's kept his promises to the Jewish people (p. 77). This is a direct attack on those who have clung to their faith in God. The ultimate insult is that even Hitler is an object worthier of faith than God is.

Three days later, optimism still present, the Jews still refused to believe that God would let dreadful things occur to them even when “German army vehicles made their appearance on their streets” (9). The towns “impressions of the Germans were rather reassuring” (9) at that time, on the contrary of the bloodcurdling conceptions they later gained when the reality of the terrors of Germans had cropped up. Months later, Elie and the other Jews’ faiths become warped when they come back down to earth and the Germans true intentions strike as they enter their long expedition in the death camps.

When Elie arrived at the first concentration camp, he was a child, but when left he was no longer human. Elie’s character changed through his encounter of the Holocaust. Elie idolized his religion, Judaism, one relevant identification for him. Elie spent hours praying and learning about Judaism, but it was the reason he and his family were tormented for. Elie was so intrigued by Judaism, that he wanted someone a “master” to guide in his studies of Kabbalah, an ancient spiritual wisdom that teaches how to improve the lives (Wiesel 8). Furthermore, he loses hope in God and in life. Elie only had a few items when he arrived in the camp, one being his family, but that would soon be taken from him. When Elie and his family arrived at the camp in Auschwitz, he was kept by his father. He always gazed after his father, caring for him until his death.

At the end of the summer of 1944, the Jewish High Holidays arrive: Rosh Hashanah, the celebration of the new year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Despite their imprisonment and affliction, the Jews of Buna come together to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, praying together and praising God’s name. On the Jewish holiday, Eliezer’s religious rebellion gets even worse, and he cannot find a reason to bless God in the midst of so much suffering. Eliezer mocks the idea that the Jews are God’s chosen people, deciding that they have only been chosen to be killed. He comes to believe that man is stronger than God, stronger and more forgiving. His denial of faith leaves him alone, or so he believes, among the 10,000 Jewish celebrants in Buna. Leaving the