Night By Elie Wiesel: Literary Analysis

Setting (time and place): Early 1940s, during World War Two, Holocaust era. starting in Sighet, Transylvania, and moving throughout concentration camps in Europe.

In life, people go through different changes when put through difficult experiences. In the book Night, Elie Wiesel is a young Jewish boy whose family is sent to a concentration camp by Nazis. The story focuses on his experiences and trials through the camp. Elie physically becomes more dehumanized and skeletal, mentally changes his perspective on religion, and socially becomes more selfish and detached, causing him to lose many parts of his character and adding to the overall theme of loss in Night.

In his book, Night, Elie Wiesel spoke about his experience as a young Jewish boy in the Nazi concentration camps. During this turbulent time period, Elie described the horrifying events that he lived through and how that affected the relationship with his father. Throughout the book, Elie and his father’s relationship faced many obstacles. In the beginning, Elie and his father have much respect for one another and at the end of the book, that relationship became a burden and a feeling of guilt. Their relationship took a great toll on them throughout their journey in the concentration camps.

In the book, our narrator, Elie, is constantly going through changes, and almost all of them are due to his time spent in Auschwitz. Prior to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie was a very different boy, he had a more optimistic outlook on life. During the first few pages of the book, Elie tells us a bit about how he viewed the world before deportation, “ I was almost thirteen and deeply observant. By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the temple.” ( 3). Elie was, as he says himself, deeply observant and devoted most of his time to his faith. He spent almost all of his time studying and worshiping. At this point, Elie’s faith is the center of his life. Elie is also shown to do a few other things and has a few more early character traits aside from being dedicated to what he believes in. Elie also sees the best of people, a few pages later he says, “The news is terrible,’ he said at last. And then one word: ‘transports’ The ghetto was to be liquidated entirely… ‘Where will they take us?” (Wiesel 14). This is one of the only time we hear about Elie being worried or scared because of the Germans before Auschwitz, and still, despite the warnings that were given and the rumors circulating, Elie doesn’t think that the Germans are actually going to do all of those terrible things. Around this time in the book, Wiesel starts to become more emotionally weighted, but none of what has happened takes full effect until much later. There are multiple instances in the book where Elie is given reason to distrust or even hate the Germans, he talks about how the Gestapo treated him and his family on page 19 “‘Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings!’ the Hungarian police were screaming.”. Yet he then goes on to say, on that very same page, that “Still our first

In the novel “Night”, by Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor suggests that when humans are faced with protecting their own mortality, they abandon their morals and values. This can be seen in both the Jewish and German people. The German’s are inhumanely cruel to protect their own jobs and safely by obeying government commands. The Jewish captives lost their morals as they fight to survive the concentration camps. Elie Wiesel encountered many obstacles that made many of his ideals changed drastically for Wiesel which was his loss in humanity throughout the book he explains the many ways he does not see people as people anymore. He also explains how all of his natural human rights were no more during the time in the Holocaust. He had to find a sense of self because he could have easily fallen apart. He could not have done anything different, he knew it was going to end poorly. Silence is a very important and prominent theme in this book as silence represents many key symbols such as. God’s silence: Eliezar questions God’s faith many times throughout this book and wonders how he could just sit there and be silent while people are mass murdering people.

In the book Night by Elie Wiesel there are many instances where his use of imagery helps establish tone and purpose. For example Elie Wiesel used fire (sight) to represent just that. The fire helps prove that the tone is serious and mature. In no way did Wiesel try to lighten up the story about the concentration camps or the Nazis. His use of fire also helps show his purpose. “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times scaled. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw

As Elie gets used to his new life in such a hellish state, he realizes that the trusting and faithful child that he once had been had been taken away along with his family and all else that he had ever known. While so many others around him still implore the God of their past to bring them through their suffering, Wiesel reveals to the reader that although he still believes that there is a God, he no longer sees Him as a just and compassionate leader but a cruel and testing spectator.

By undergoing the torture,they are pushed to the limits. Elie and his father shared a distant relationship and lacked of support. Their relationship went from an imperfect relationship to a strong bond. Their bond strengthen when they had to rely on each other for comfort. The father and son relationship displayed, “Elie Wiesel Night” symbolizes the need for human contact, a strong reliable faith and the important family bond.

Night, by Elie Wiesel, showed the devastation of Eliezer’s childhood and illustrated the loss of innocence through the evil of others. Elie Wiesel expressed to us that one’s own faith and beliefs can be challenged through torture and ongoing suffering. The novel, Night, allowed the reader to witness the change in Eliezer from one of an innocent child who strongly adhered to his faith in God into a person who questioned not only his faith and God but of himself as well. The cruelty is shown to him while in the concentration camp forced him to wonder if there was a God and if so why would he put him and the others through such torture. Through his suffering, Eliezer’s beliefs dramatically and negatively changed his faith in God and compelled him to experience a transformative relationship with his father.

Have you ever had to make an instant decision that would significantly impact your life?

In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie Wiesel is a young boy who struggles to survive after being forced to live in the brutal concentration camp of Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, death and suffering is rampant, but due to compassionate words and actions from others, Elie is able to withstand these severe living conditions and overcome the risk of death in the unforgiving Auschwitz. As shown through the actions and words of characters in Night, compassion, the sympathetic pity for the suffering or misfortune of others is critical to the human experience because it enables humans to empathize with each other, empathizing which allows us to feel the need to assist others which can often be vital for survival.

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” (P. Levi) Hitler was a monster but would be powerless without the Nazis who followed him without questioning his authority. In the Novella Night Elie Wiesel tell the horrific story of the intrinsically unjust events that occured within the concentration camps, that evokes a feeling of disgust and sorrow in the person reading it. His ability to elude danger fills the reader with hope; his vivid vocabulary and astounding use of literary devices makes the words seem as if they were literally jumping off the page. In the movie The Devil’s Arithmetic Robert

In the excerpt above, the word "night" is repeated multiple times, giving off a negative connotation. The authors reuse of the word, and placement of the word makes it seem as if their lives are never truly ending, like they keep have last days but they are never truly the last days. I think that the author used "night" as the tittle because it conveys the message of how dark the situation really is. It gives off this vibe that the things he went through were dark, harsh, scary, and that no one knew what was coming next. In all after reading the book you get the idea that night sort of symbolizes a new beginning that could possibly bring on a slightly worse life than that of the one they are ending.

I would recommend this memoir to others for several reasons. I believe that many people don’t know as much about the holocaust as they should, even people whose ancestors had to experience it. Before we read the saw section from Night, I had never actually read a real story from the holocaust, i had only seen movies and read realistic fiction stories that depicted stories that were similar to real events in one way or another. The first person point of view and literary elements that Wiesel uses really helps the reader understand how terrifying being in a concentration camp was, especially during selection. Throughout the passage Wiesel uses several literary elements, such as verbal irony, repetition, and parallelism. On page 310 Wiesel uses

I chose to use a photo and a poem for this task. A key narrative that surrounds the Holocaust is that of remembering. There are museums, memorial sites, novels and numerous other forms of commemorating the Holocaust in order to ensure that as a society we do not forget, through the preservation of this narrative. This is to both show our respect for those who suffered during that time and to ensure it does not happen again. The poem is taken from Elie Wiesel’s novel Night which is set during the Holocaust and follows the experiences of a young man, from his home in a small town to his emancipation by Allied soldiers from a concentration camp (Wiesel, 2006). The image was created by satirist and artist Shahak Shapira by superimposing selfies taken by visitors to the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin with actual photos taken during the Holocaust, to highlight the disrespectful nature ‘selfies’ at a site such as this (Demilked, 2017).