Rhetorical Strategies Used In Night By Elie Wiesel

By using repetition in his book, Wiesel is able to emphasise the terror that had occurred in the camps. To illustrate the horrors of the camp, Wiesel wrote “Never Shall I forget that night, the first night in camp ... Never,” (Wiesel

He was finally free, no joy filled his heart but abandonment was drowning it. How dangerous is indifference to humankind as it pertains to suffering and the need for conscience understanding when people are faced with unjust behaviors? Elie Wiesel is an award winning author and novelist who has endured and survived hardships. One of the darkest times in history, a massacre of over six million Jews, the Holocaust and Hitler himself. After the Holocaust he went on and wrote the internationally acclaimed memoir “Night,” in which he spoke out against persecution and injustice across the world. In the compassionate yet pleading speech, ¨Perils of Indifference,¨ Elie Wiesel analyzes the injustices that himself and others endured during the twentieth century, as well as the hellish acts of the Holocaust through effective rhetorical choices.

Although there are many different stories about the holocaust, Elie Wiesel's story is very vivid and full of the jarring reality of his experiences. He doesn’t hold back any of the cruelness and torment he was forced to endure as an adolescent. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses repetition, imagery, and symbolism to illustrate the deprivation of his former self during his traumatic experiences during his time in the Nazi work camp.

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.

Wiesel exemplified the dehumanization of the Jewish prisoners in Night. He showed the readers a personal view of the Nazi's treatment to the prisoners. They lost their possessions,

Elie Wiesel uses many different styles to present his main purpose, one of the most widely used is anaphora. He does this to help the audience further develop a context of the situations Wiesel went through as a child. Wiesel asserts, “ They no longer feel pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it,” this creates a reaction of the audience to feel sympathy for the “musselmanners” that were left to die, it also forces the audience to imagine the horrific details of Wiesel’s childhood. Furthermore, towards the end of his speech to change tones to appeal to the audience while he questions the American government on why they chose not to intervene. He then creates another tonal shift, patronizing

Soon after he and his father were split off from his mother sisters, be began to focus more on his own life rather than others. Occasionally he tried to help his father, but his father refused his offers. Towards the end of the story, Wiesel began worrying that his father would be killed for his feebleness. As stated in the book, "Whose was it? Mine? His? I said nothing. Nor did he. Never before had we understood each other so clearly” (Page 68). Wiesel and his father at first had separated thoughts, each in their own world; at this point, they both share and agree on the same thoughts, without even needing to speak to each other. The book would soon foreshadow the death of both of his parents when Wiesel stated, "How kindly they treated me. Like an orphan. I thought: Even now, my father is helping me” (Page 75). When Wiesel stated “Like an orphan”, he foreshadows the fact that his father would die. His mother would already be considered dead by him, so the death of his father would ultimately make him an orphan. However, Wiesel tried his best to keep his father alive, even though on many occasions, his father would offer his soup and bread to him. When selection came, Wiesel worried that his father would not survive. As he stated in the book, "I tightened my grip on my father's hand. The old, familiar fear: not to lose him” (Page 104). The relationship between the father and the son has grown strong,

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.

Traumatic and scarring events occur on a daily basis; from house fires to war, these memories are almost impossible to forget. The Holocaust is only one of the millions of traumas that have occurred, yet it is known worldwide for sourcing millions of deaths. Elie Wiesel was among the many victims of the Holocaust, and one of the few survivors. In the memoir, “Night”, by Elie Wiesel, Elie, the main character, is forever changed because of his traumatic experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camps.

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

. One persuasive technique he uses is pathos. He uses this technique to gain empathy from the audience, to allow them to really feel like they are in the shoes of the victims. This is seen when Wiesel says “ To be abandoned by god was worse than to be punished by him” (444). The audience is able to feel how the victims felt, which helps convey his message of indifference more effectively as now they will actually get impacted by his message.

In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel refers to the taste of soups to compare the emotions that existed during two different executions. The first person to be executed was a young strong well-built adolescent who stole during the air raid; described stealing soup in page 57, “ He reached the first cauldron. Hearts raced: he had succeeded. Jealousy consumed us, burned us like straw. We never thought for a moment of admiring him.

The Holocaust was a horrific time period when over six million Jewish people were systematically exterminated by the Nazi government. Throughout this period, the Jews were treated particularly inhumane because the Nazi viewed their ethnicities as a disease to humanity. Dehumanization is a featured theme in Elie Wiesel’s novel about the Holocaust since he demonstrated numerous examples of the severe conditions endured by the Jewish people. The nonfiction story Night by Elie Wiesel focuses on inhumanity and reveals human beings are capable of committing great atrocities and behaving cruelly, when such actions are condoned by society, peer pressure, and ethical beliefs. Elie Wiesel uses literary devices to produce a consistent theme of inhumanity.

As a young boy, once dedicated to his religion and God, Wiesel experienced horrors awful enough to abandon his spirituality. Wiesel describes his first night in Auschwitz as a night “which murdered [his] God and [his] soul, and turned [his] dreams to dust (Wiesel 32). When he arrives in Auschwitz, a prisoner points to smokestacks and asks “what’s being burned there?” another prisoner answers “that’s where you’re going to die;” Eliezer and the prisoners were surrounded with the smoke of bodies being