What Is The Theme Of Personal Identity In Night By Elie Wiesel

Throughout a lifetime, people undergo many different identities to discover their true self. Elie Wiesel, the author of the memoir Night, suffered a major event that changed his identity forever. In his experience at the concentration camps during the Holocaust, Elie had to fight to stay alive even during the most resilient moments. This event shaped his life and brought Elie to endure different perspectives in his time in the camps. Eliezer’s identity changed throughout the memoir from faithful, to fearful, to hopeless.

The book Night is a story of family, religion, violence, and hope. This book tells the story of Elie Wiesel’s journey through the holocaust. During the novel, Wiesel writes with the purpose of teaching us several lessons. This lesson is conveyed through Wiesel’s actions, other character’s actions, as well as quotations. The lesson Wiesel taught in Night is to persevere and never lose hope up no matter how hopeless the situation may seem.

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.

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering” (Nietzsche). This quote, said by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, describes the desire to survive that was inside of Elie Wiesel in his story. The book describes Elie’s late teen years when he was sent to a concentration camp by the German government. In the book, he is separated from his whole family except for his old father, and both are put to work inside of the camp. As Elie suffers through the camp, his faith and his life face many tests and trials. There are many instances throughout the book when people die or when somebody loses their faith. The theme of the book Night, written by Elie Wiesel, is survival, as shown by the death of many Jews during the Holocaust, people willing to do anything to survive, and people’s faith not surviving the traumatic experiences of the concentration camps.

Eliezer in the book mentions several times that the prisoners and him were no longer men. The prisoners in camp were broken down into shadows of the men they were before their imprisonment. This is because the Nazis tormented them. The Nazis treated the prisoners like animals. They put them in cattle cars, forced them out of there homes, and fed them the bare minimum they needed to stay alive. All of these things made the prisoners lose their identity as men. This helped the Nazi cause because it made the prisoners lose hope. Prisoners with no hope become easier to control, and that benefited the Nazis. Therefore the loss of identity of the prisoners helped the Nazi cause.

In the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel the theme of self preservation and loss of identity plays a critical role in the development of Eliezer (Elie Wiesel) throughout the book. As Wiesel suffers through the tragic events of the holocaust, self preservation proves to be more difficult to keep and losing one’s character seems easy. Wiesel’s identity, faith, and his will to live start to fade as he begins to forms a new character, a character who remains silent. Losing identity means losing the values that makes up a character.

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

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.

The early 1940s, an observant, young boy, and his caring father: the start of a story that would become known throughout the world of Eliezer Wiesel. His eye-opening story is one of millions born of the Holocaust. Elie’s identity, for which he is known by, is written out word for word his memoir, Night. Throughout his journey, Elie’s voice drifts from that of an innocent teen intrigued with the teachings of his religion to that of a soul blackened by a theoretical evil consuming the Nazis and Hitler’s Germany. Elie Wiesel's memoir, Night, examines the theme of identity through the continuous motifs of losing one’s self in the face of death and fear, labeling innocent people for a single dimension of what defines a human being, and the oppression seen in the Holocaust based on the identities of those specifically targeted and persecuted.

Humans are very social by nature, the idea of family, and friends are things that separate us from other animals. Ask anyone what important to them, and most will reply family, and friends. This is also true during the holocaust; many of the survivors lived only because of the thought of their loved ones. When he arrives at Auschwitz, Elie meets Stein, a relative from Antwerp. Stein tells them that "the only thing that keeps [him] alive is to know that Reizel and the little ones are still alive. Were it not for them, I would give up…" (45). Because of our social nature, humans become connected to one another on a much deeper level. When a person loses those that they care about the most, they also lose the will to live. For some people this happens very quickly, depression sets in and a person will become immune to their surroundings, no longer caring what happens. Elie survives through the holocaust because his father is with him. Because of his

Imagine one day being able to be yourself and the next day someone else is in control of your every move. This is what happened to the Jewish people during the Holocaust. When the Germans came in to take over, they imposed regulations that did not allow the Jewish people to uphold their identity. Some restrictions that stripped away their identities include having to wear stars on their arms, having numbers tattooed onto their wrists, and wearing a striped uniform. The Book Night by Elie Wiesel is a true story told from the perspective of Elie, explaining what life was like living through the holocaust at a concentration camp. A major idea that ties into Elie and the loss of identity was Elie’s major personality change from the beginning of the book to the end of the book. All the little things that the Jewish people could not do anymore stripped them of their identity as well. There were a bunch of rules set: they could not attend synagogue, be on the streets after 6, and they were not allowed to travel they train. By taking away these little things, it did not allow the Jewish citizens to continue their daily activities and be themselves. The Germans also dehumanized the Jewish people, which means to deprive of human qualities, personality, or spirit. This is exactly what the Germans did by treating the “Jews” as less. The inhumane way that the Jewish people were treated did not allow them to be themselves, which then lead to the loss of identity.

In the memoir, Night, author Elie Wiesel portrays the dehumanization of individuals and its lasting result in a loss of faith in God. Throughout the Holocaust, Jews were doggedly treated with disrespect and inhumanity. As more cruelty was bestowed upon them, the lower their flame of hope and faith became as they began turning on each other and focused on self preservation over family and friends. The flame within them never completely died, but rather stayed kindling throughout the journey until finally it stood flickering and idle at the eventual halt of this seemingly never-ending nightmare. Elie depicts the perpetuation of violence that crops up with the Jews by teaching of the loss in belief of a higher power from devout to doubt they

Within the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, the author does an exceptional job of allowing the reader to feel empathy. His record of the personal traumas that he faced during his retainment at Holocaust Concentration camps is detailed, raw, and emotional. Elie succeeds in including serious and relevant topics during the telling of his story. One of the more prominent topics that his story focuses on is his treatment as The Other during the Holocaust, and how that changed his views on religion. His story not only allows the reader to view the different ways that one can be treated as the other, but he also lets the reader see how that changes a person in more ways than one can imagine. Treating one person differently can change how they see themselves and how they see others, but that is not all. Elie allows the readers to see how treatment as The Other can change someone physically, mentally, and it can change how someone views the world and what it holds. The treatment that the Jewish community endured