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Motifs In Elie Wiesel's Night

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A Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel shares his experience in Auschwitz-Birkaneau, one of Hitler’s concentration camps, in his autobiography Night. In the memoir, Wiesel utilizes the motifs: silence, survival, and responsibility to develop character, plot, and other literary elements. The use of motif “silence” was significant as it changed Elie as a character throughout the events in the book. As Elie and his family enter Birkenau, “[his] hand tightened its grip on [his] father” which indicates that he will stay with his father at all costs and not lose him (Wiesel 30). However, as Elie faces different situtations, his actions are different than what he has promised before. The Gypsy hits his father hard, but Elie “had not even blinked… and

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