Imagery in "Night" Essay

When people lose their dignity, they also lose a part of the very thing that makes them human. Despair, hopelessness, fear and apathy are all ways a human can lose their humanity. The eyes provide a window onto the soul, and thus a view on the person’s mental state. The eyes also function in reverse, as a symbolic gesture of control over someone. All of this is present in Night, by Elie Wiesel, an account of human tragedy, human cruelty, human dignity, and the loss thereof.

From the time where Elie had to decide to fight for his father’s life, to the time where he questioned his beliefs, Elie has had to make many life-changing decisions. As some of his decisions left negative consequences, some were left a positive outcome. In the end, all the decisions Elie had made in the camps has made his life miserable or at its best. For better or for worse, the events that Elie encountered makes his life unforgettable as realizes there was more to life than he had thought of

Elie’s physical changes throughout the story are best displayed on page 115: “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed has never left me” (Wiesel 115). This quote is taken from the end

An example of how Wiesel uses imagery is how he is able to create vivid descriptions of what he was feeling during this march. One of the first occurrences of this in Chapter six is when Wiesel describes how their march had changed: “We were no longer marching, we were running. Like automatons. The SS were running as well, weapons in hand. We looked like we were running from them” (Wiesel 85). This quotation is incredibly

Elie Wiesel major purpose for animal imagery in the story, the audience has not lived through the Holocaust like Elie did. Using the mistreatment of animals, many people have information and witnessed animal mistreatment could paint picture of the torture and horror of the Holocaust better and vivid. Wiesel was sending a message of not to repeat history and to be woke about the damage being done and to fix humanity. Wanting for everyone to know, all of humanity is equal,”Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone - and, ultimately, hating himself or herself.”( Brainy Quotes) The novel is the perspective of Elie, as Elie was to be seen and treated a dirty animal of the treatment, from fighting for food, beat unnecessarily and other horrible torture tactics, that animals would

Therefore Elie shows how the prisoners of the Holocaust went through all different shapes and kinds of cruelty. They were forced to do things that did not want to do and go places they did not want to go because there was a threat of survival. The men and women who were imprisoned in the camp got barely enough food to survive and sometimes when days without any food or water. The cruelty shown by the SS men and women shaped how people thought and acted around

The author uses these dramatic pictures to warn people of the dangers of indifference. In paragraph 5, the author give a clear picture of what life for the victims looked like, “ During the darkest of times, inside the ghettos and death camps…” It's hard to imagine that just doing nothing can cause such harm, but by not standing up to the aggressors, it's not preventing them from continuing the harm. Elie Wiesel describes the night of Kristallnacht in paragraph eight, “the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps…” Even though this was only the first state sponsored program, the effects were still devastating and that is what Wiesel is describing here through the imagery. It conveys the tone of being cautionary because the large effects were still present and could've been prevented if people who chose to turn their backs had not. Finally, paragraph six does an excellent job of demonstrating the cautionary ton through the use of imagery. Wiesel explains how Auschwitz prisoners thought that it was such a closely guarded secret and portrays that here, “If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene.” The author cautions other world leaders here without even directly saying so by talking about the US government as if they were completely naive.

One image that demonstrates the horrific things that went on during the holocaust was when Elie and his father were being moved to the barracks. They were being forced to walk by the pits that were filled with fire in which babies and little toddlers were being thrown into. “Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever” (34). It was this experience that shook up Elie’s faith and introduced him to the awful things he would witness and have to go through in the near future. This made it so hard for him to continue on and not just give up and throw himself on the barbed

Lastly, in a box car with hardly any rations to spare, Elie observes a man’s reaction as he throws in bread to the starving Jews, since rations were scarce they fought over it in order to survive. As Elie arrived to Auschwitz, men and woman were separated from each other and forced to get tattoos of numbers. After his first

| This passage, I think, describes how much a person can change once he or she has been exposed to the many horrors present in the Jewish concentration camps. These people in these camps might have easily become mentally unstable, because they would witness murder and beatings every day; the suffering of countless people. The people themselves also had to endure unknown numbers of days in cattle cars and barracks, which could also have been traumatic. Seeing and experiencing all of these things can change a person, and the way they think. No longer is Elie the innocent child who wanted to study religion in his hometown, but now has to deal with the living hell of his mind, which has ultimately changed him.

Elie Wiesel uses many literary devices to illustrate the inhumanity involved in the concentration camps. One literary device that he uses is imagery. He uses imagery to give a perspective on his experiences. He uses imagery to exhibit the pain that took place from the torture. For example, Elie says, “From the depths of the mirror,

Children are murdered. Innocent people are held prisoners. No one knows. The ones who do know do not try to help. This is the story of the Holocaust and the atrocities the Nazis committed.

The Holocaust revealed the extreme evil in human nature on both a grand and small scale. Hitler, a strong supporter of antisemitism, had an agenda to create a dominant Aryan race and would stop at nothing to diminish the Jewish population. This meant forcing innocent Jewish people into death and labor camps, where conditions were brutal and treatment was atrociously inhumane. Overtime, this grand scale oppression sparked anger and violence within the victims. Instead of supporting one another in times of trouble, they began to commit senseless acts of violence towards one another in response to the cruelty they faced. Survival became their highest value, at any cost. Elie Wiesel witnesses this first hand on many accounts and spends his life striving to educate the world about the horrors of the Holocaust. In his Holocaust memoir, Night, he uses the motifs: night, silence, and flames, to develop the idea that evil is part of human nature.

The first poem we read was “If Suddenly You Come For Me” by N. Nor. Night and this poem connect through many different ways. For example in the second line of the poem it says “To throw me in an iron cage.” It relates well to “Night” because they got deported against there own will as does the person in the story who got thrown into to jail or “an iron cage.” The statement in the poem, “And I shall not repent or rage.” Associates to night in the form that Elie doesn’t have a fit or a rage during this period of time when he was in the Concentration Camp. The second poem we chose was “Three Poems” by Hannah Senesh. In the second line of the second line of the second paragraph says “To the suffering of winter, to frost in the night.” This statement

Every author has a different ways to portray a certain scene and the different elements used can be identify in Elie Wiesel and Art Spiegelman’s ‘hanging’ scene. For example, in Night, the reader uses his imagination to create the images of the horrific events, while in Maus, the images are ‘fed’ to him, giving a different some sort of surprise or shock. Depending on the situation, one novel’s technique might be more emotionally powerful at times than the other.