Rhetorical Analysis Of Night By Elie Wiesel

Night by Elie Wiesel is an autobiography about his experience during the Holocaust when he was fifteen years old. Elie is fifteen when the tragedy begins. He is taken with his family through many trials and then is separated from everyone besides his father. They are left with only each other, of which they are able to confide in and look to for support. The story is told through a series of creative writing practices. Mr. Wiesel uses strong diction, and syntax as well as a combination of stylistic devices. This autobiography allows the readers to understand a personal, first-hand account of the terrible events of the holocaust. The ways that diction is used in Night helps with this understanding.

One of the rhetorical devices that Elie Wiesel uses to create and further emphasize the theme of losing faith is personification. An example of personification being used for this purpose in the novel is, “Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.” (34) This quote uses personification to show Elie’s loss of faith by animating certain moments in his life that made him completely lose faith in God and feel like his soul was torn in half by the atrocities the Germans committed. While Elie was being transferred to concentration camps, he experienced moments such as babies being thrown into fire pits and his best friends dieing by his side. Another example of Elie using personification is, “Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled.” (67) Elie personifies the fibers in his body to display the progression of his faith being lost. While the other Jews were praying Elie rebelled against the thought of praising some “God” that did not help them in their time of need. Finally, Elie uses the personification, “In the beginning there was faith—which is childish; trust—which is vain; and illusion—which is dangerous."(preface, x) Elie Wiesel uses this to enforce the theme of losing faith by claiming that having faith in something as trivial as a deity during a time of need is childish to begin with.

In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, “Night”, readers see a dramatic change from the young, sensitive and spiritual individual to a, boy with the mindset of an adult that is spiritually dead and is unemotional. Elie shows this in his memoir by rewriting what he saw, thought, or what he heard while in concentration camps, this occurs, in the three sections of the memoir.

In the novel, Night, written and experienced by Elie Wiesel, rhetorical devices such as logos, ethos and pathos are used to expatiate the events in the story. Elie was just a child when the invasions commenced. This autobiographical novel consists of the story of Elie Wiesel and his family, primarily his father, as they fight through the treacherous nights. The rhetorical devices compare to the poem by Judy (Weissenberg) Cohen. Judy is also a survivor of the holocaust that speaks at the Holocaust Memorial in Toronto, Canada. This poem and the novel compare through their rhetorical strategies.

As the famous journalist Iris Chang once said, “As the Nobel Laureate warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.” After experiencing the tragedies that occurred during the Holocaust, Eliezer Wiesel narrated “Night”. Eliezer wrote “Night” in an attempt to prevent something similar to the Holocaust from happening again, by showing the audience what the consequences are that come from becoming a bystander. Elie illustrated numerous themes by narrating the state of turmoil he was in during the Holocaust. In Night, Eliezer provided insight into what he experienced in order to teach the unaware audience about three themes; identity, silence, and faith.

At first glance, Night, by Eliezer Wiesel does not seem to be an example of deep or emotionally complex literature. It is a tiny book, one hundred pages at the most with a lot of dialogue and short choppy sentences. But in this memoir, Wiesel strings along the events that took him through the Holocaust until they form one of the most riveting, shocking, and grimly realistic tales ever told of history’s most famous horror story. In Night, Wiesel reveals the intense impact that concentration camps had on his life, not through grisly details but in correlation with his lost faith in God and the human conscience.

Many themes exist in Night, Elie Wiesel’s nightmarish story of his Holocaust experience. From normal life in a small town to physical abuse in concentration camps, Night chronicles the journey of Wiesel’s teenage years. Neither Wiesel nor any of the Jews in Sighet could have imagined the horrors that would befall them as their lived changed under the Nazi regime. The Jews all lived peaceful, civilized lives before German occupation. Eliezer Wiesel was concerned with mysticism and his father was “more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin” (4). This would change in the coming weeks, as Jews are segregated, sent to camps, and both physically and emotionally abused. These changes and abuse would dehumanize

In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, shares the tragic occurrences that he has lived through in the various concentration camps during the Holocaust. Judy Cohen, Holocaust survivor, spoke about the horrors of the Holocaust by using rhetoric to persuade her audience. Therefore, these two sources both give accurate descriptions of a historical documentation of the life of a prisoner during the Holocaust and use rhetoric to help visualize the events of the prisoners struggles. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses rhetoric to persuade his audience about the true actions of the German Nazis by using pathos, ethos, and logos.

Have you ever been through a situation that has hindered you to an extent of where you couldn’t find the right words to express how it made you feel or what happened in that specific event? If so, then you’re not alone. Survivors of the holocaust, a genocide that took place during World War II to systematically kill millions of Jews, have too had a difficult time expressing the horrific period of their life after they were taken from the comfort of their homes and sent to concentration camps. Elie Wiesel, a main character in the novel Night, was a survivor and one of those people who didn’t know what words to use in terms of telling his experiences in the captivity. As a result, Wiesel found other techniques to use, which includes using words as symbols, repetition and explaining how the original meaning of a word is sometimes not enough to thoroughly tell the full story.

Elie Wiesel argues that indifference denies the humanity of victims and urges people to face their own indifference.

Killing is commanded – Exodus 32:27 – And he told them, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Put your sword on your hip, every one of you! Now go up and down the camp, from gate to gate, and slay your own kinsmen, your friends, and neighbors!”

The novel, Night, authored by Elie Wiesel, tells a story about how a child named Eliezer survives the Holocaust along side his fighting father. In the end, death confronts Eliezer's father and steals him away. Judy (Weissenberg) Cohen, a survivor of the Holocaust, also goes through these treacherous trials and shares them in her speech. She describes the dreadful events she witnessed and how it scares her of the evil mankind holds. Both, Elie and Judy, use different rhetorical strategies to express their thoughts and views of what they experienced and witnessed in the Holocaust.

In the 1940s, while many of the people focused on the Second World War, Hitler and many of the Germans under his influence killed numerous groups of people that tainted the German or Aryan superior 4race. These people included Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, people with disabilities, prisoners of war, and communists. The Final Solution, or the Holocaust as it is known now, was a plan made by the top of the Nazi party and was executed primarily by Hitler's followers. Holocaust, the word now brings living fear to those who experienced the tragedy and those reading the survivors' accounts. Night by Elie Wiesel, a memoir using logos and pathos at a high efficiency, and Schindler`s letter by his Jews, excels at providing creditability, are two accounts that have ample amounts of rhetoric.

The Message of the Memoir Night Eliezer Wiesel writes, Eliezer Wiesel is a Jewish Holocaust survivor, an author, and a human rights activist. At the onset of the Holocaust however, Eliezer Wiesel was a thirteen-year-old, small-town-boy of Sighet, Transylvania who by all accounts was “deeply observant” (Wiesel 3). The Holocaust was a dark time in Jewish history in which Anti- Semitics; mainly the German Nazis led by Hitler, tried to exterminate the Jews. As an author, Eliezer uses an array of rhetorical appeals. Rhetorical appeals consist of pathos, logos, and ethos.

Elie Wiesel used a variety of rhetorical strategies in his novel Night to convey a his horrendous story of the holocaust, through a lense that forcibly effects the reader, by not only putting you in the mindset of one of the victims, but by hitting on a variety of themes that are close to readers across the globe, to create a story that will be impactful on anyone who reads it. For example in the passages we read in class, the second excerpt did a phenomenal job of illustrating the heart wrenching story the Wiesel had to face first hand. Wiesel starts by referring to the march/run as a machine, repeating, how he had to focus on running, describing the group as automatons, saying that they were running without thought, mindless machines. This