Mekai Brown
Ramos
1st Block
October 9, 2017
How does Wiesel use literary devices to create a consistent theme?
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.
Wiesel incorporates irony in his novel to create a perpetual theme of inhumanity. It is ironic when, after the Jews are ordered to wear yellow stars, Elie’s father declares, “The yellow star? Oh well, what of it? You don’t die of it…” (11 Wiesel). Verbal irony occurs in this moment because the statement is suggesting the opposite of what is truly expected and meant. The wearing of the yellow star was one step on the pathway of concentration camps which eventually led to almost certain death. Therefore, these actions were very inhumane because Nazis required Jewish people to label themselves with the yellow star, and then transferred them to extermination campgrounds. The author uses figurative language to focus on an adolescent’s perspective on a situation, the Holocaust, where he and those around him are no longer treated as humans. Similarly, Elie deliberately uses several instances of foreshadowing as a warning that further develops the dehumanization theme. As the cattle car was approaching Auschwitz concentration camp, Madame Schächter screams, “’Jews listen to me,’ she cried. ‘I see fire! I see flames, huge flames’” (25 Wiesel)! Madame foreshadows the annihilation of millions of Jews being burned alive and dead within the crematoriums located at Auschwitz. Also, her hallucinations predicted the horrific fate of all the Jewish people, who would suffer
Some of the opportunities available for them to escape was when they first heard from Moshe the Beadle but they ignored it and stayed where they were. They had opportunity to immigrate to Poland but Ellie's father said that he didn't want to start over a new life. When Ellie's family friend came to bang on their window when they were in the ghetto and they didn't realize that it was an opportunity calling. The maid offered to take them all in but they refused yet again because the father refused to want to take that.
Imagine, losing the part of you that makes you unique, or being treated like you were worth absolutely nothing. Think about losing all that you hold on to: your family, friends, everything that you had. Imagine, being treated like an animal, or barely receiving enough food to live. All of these situations and more is what the Jews went through during the Holocaust. During the period of 1944 - 1945, a man by the name of Elie Wiesel was one of the millions of Jews that were experiencing the wrath of Hitler’s destruction in the form of intense labor and starvation. The novel Night written by the same man, Elie Wiesel, highlights the constant struggle they faced every single day during the war. From the first acts of throwing the Jews into
The first time fire appears in the book is when Madame Schächter screams in terror, claiming that she can see fire from the train. It later becomes known that she received a vision of the horrors that were coming to them in the near future. Fire is also a symbol of cruelty because of its role in the death of millions in the crematoria and in fire pits. Elie witnesses the burning of babies in the beginning of the novel, which is the first time Elie truly understands the severity of the Nazi power. “Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky,” (Wiesel 34).
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.
Language has the ability to impact the mood and tone of a piece in literature. In Night, Wiesel uses imagery, symbolism, diction and foreshadowing to illustrate dehumanization. The deeper true horror of the Holocaust is not what they Nazi’s did, but the behavior they legitimized as human beings being dehumanized by one another through silence and apathy.
It’s not lethal…” (11) Shortly after, they were sent off to Auschwitz. Another example of this ignored foreshadowing is on the way to the concentration camps. Mrs. Schächter, a member of Wiesel’s community, began to scream of a fire in the distance. She was quickly dismissed as tired, her claims being false. “She is hallucinating because she is thirsty, poor woman…
Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, Recounts his first-hand experiences of Nazi atrocities in his memoir, Night as Wiesel struggles to maintain faith. Inhumanity and cruelty are two key parts relating to dehumanization in the novel Night by Elie Wiesel. Inhumanity and cruelty dehumanization of Jews during the Holocaust. This cruelty is important to the theme in this book because this is what the Holocaust is about. This book focuses on the Jews of Sighet because that is where the author Elie is from, the book entails the horrendous story of one Jew and his father out of six million Jews. Cruelty is directly related to this book as a whole because it is basically what the Holocaust is about, Nazi’s and Germans mistreating Jewish people because
In 2006, Elie Wiesel published the memoir “Night,” which focuses on his terrifying experiences in the Nazi extermination camps during the World War ll. Elie, a sixteen-year-old Jewish boy, is projected as a dynamic character who experiences overpowering conflicts in his emotions. One of his greatest struggles is the sense helplessness that he feels when all the beliefs and rights, of an entire nation, are reduced to silence. Elie and the Jews are subjected daily to uninterrupted torture and dehumanization. During the time spent in the concentration camp, Elie is engulfed by an uninterrupted roar of pain and despair. Throughout this horrific experience, Elie’s soul perishes as he faces constant psychological abuse, inhuman living conditions, and brutal negation of his humanity.
Cruelty surrounds the world constantly, and is used frequently in works of literature to reveal certain things about the theme. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, acts of cruelty are used to express the theme and enhance its message. One of the largest themes revealed by these acts is “man’s inhumanity to man,” which includes mistreatment of Jews by the Nazis, the common people, and other Jews. Watching the large amounts of violence, abuse, and discrimination that occur in this memoir show us the horrors of the Holocaust and how it transformed the men and women who it experienced it, as well as those who caused it.
Irony, a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result. Throughout Night there is use of situational and verbal irony. This use of irony keeps the reader interested. The use of irony causes the reader to know things that the characters often are not aware of.
Although Eliezer survived the bloodcurdling Holocaust, countless others succumbed to the Nazi’s inhumanity. The Nazi’s progressively reduced the Jewish people to being little more than “things” which were a nuisance to them. Throughout Night, dehumanization consistently took place, as the Nazis oppressed the Jewish citizens. The Germans dehumanized Eliezer, his father, and other fellow Jews for the duration of the memoir Night, which had a lasting effect on Eliezer’s identity, attitude and outlook. Wiesel displays the Nazi’s vicious actions to accentuate the way by which they dehumanize the Jewish population. The Nazis had an abundance of practices to dehumanize the Jews including beatings, starvation, separation of families, crude murders, forced labor, among other horrific actions.
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
“Hunger—thirst—fear—transport—selection—fire—chimney: these words all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they meant something else” (Wiesel ix). Years after he was liberated from the concentration camp at Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel wrote Night as a memoir of his life and experiences during the Holocaust, while a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Scholars often refer to the Holocaust as the “anti-world”. This anti-world is an inverted world governed by absurdity. The roles of those living in the anti-world are reversed and previous values and morals are no longer important. Elie Wiesel portrays four of the characters, in his memoir, Night, as prophetic figures, each with a new warning for the Jews. There are four main characteristics that make a person a prophetic figure. First, they always have a story or a tale they are trying to tell. Secondly, this story usually contains a warning of some kind. The perception of these individuals as mad by others in their community is the third characteristic; and isolation by their community as a result of this belief is the fourth characteristic. Throughout the story Eliezer struggles with his faith and belief in God. Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, characterizes four prophetic figures to portray the distorted nature of the anti-world and to illustrate a constant questioning of God and faith by Eliezer.
Wiesel uses foreshadowing to convey the mood of uncertainty. At this point in the book, the Jews are about to be ghettoized and eventually sent to the concentration camps. Because this is about to happen, Elie's father can sense that something bad is coming. His face had "turned pale" in anticipation of the Jews heading into what will seem like a lifetime of