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Relationship between Father and Son in Elie Wiesel's 'Night'

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Elie Wiesel's Night: Fathers and sons

Over the course of Elie Wiesel's novel Night, the protagonist Eliezer gradually begins to lose his faith in God. He sinks deeper and deeper into the evils of the Holocaust, first in the ghetto, then in the Nazi concentration camp. As Eliezer's views on religion begin to change, so does his relationship with his father. He begins the novel still a young boy, and regards his father as powerful and full of strength. Gradually, he is stripped of his boyhood illusions as well as his faith, and comes to regard his father as an ordinary mortal. He grows frustrated with his father's physical weakness, and assumes the role of occasionally reluctant protector of the older man, rather than the adolescent he was before. The relationship betwee Eliezer and God, and his loss of faith in God parallels that of the loss of faith in his father. [Thesis] One reason Eliezer comes to lose his faith is because of the way he sees the human character of the victims corrupted in the death camps. In the ghetto, there was at least some unity and solidarity amongst the persecuted Jews. In the death camps, survival is the only priority. Eliezer's mother and sister are taken away; he is left alone with his father with the men. Eliezer's father, ignored warnings of the horrors of the death camps when the family was still living in the ghetto. Almost immediately, upon coming to Auschwitz, Eliezer exhibits religious skepticism when seeing the sights of the bodies

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