Character Change In Night By Elie Wiesel

Character Change in Night The book, Night, by Eliezer (Elie) Wiesel, entails the story of his childhood in Nazi concentration camps all around Europe. Around the middle of the 20th century in the early 1940s, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi army traveled around Europe in an effort to exterminate the Jewish population. As they went to through different countries in order to enforce this policy, Nazi officers sent every Jewish person they found to a concentration camp. Often called death camps, the main purpose was to dispose of people through intense work hours and terrible living conditions. Wiesel writes about his journey from a normal, happy life to a horrifying environment surrounded by death in the Nazi concentration camps. Night is an amazingly

About halfway through his imprisonment, Eliezer had gotten accustomed to life in a concentration camp. Despite the magnitude of death in every camp Elie was held hostage, nothing was worse than when three people were hanged in front of his eyes. The people were convicted suspiciously without confirmation of their crime; the youngest of which was about a twelve year old boy who was an assistant to one of the Nazi Kapos. After this experience, Wiesel writes, “That night, the soup tasted of corpses.” (65). The author incorporates a metaphor for his feelings and related it to the soup Eliezer was given; the soup did not literally taste like corpses, but this was how he felt because of all the death. The symbolism of his soup tasting like corpses relates to how death was surrounding Wiesel at the camp, and it also represents how he has lost faith in God. There were many places throughout the book in which Elie experiences things that make him question his faith, none more than when he thought there would be no chance of his

He is taken to a hospital in order to treat his malnutrition, wounds, and disease. After weeks of constant care, doctors cleared Wiesel and he was able to look at himself in a mirror for the first time in a few years. As he stares at himself in disbelief, he says, “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me.” (115). Once again, the author was able to incorporate a metaphor that describes his body’s condition as it did not strictly resemble a corpse. This metaphor also symbolizes the mental, physical, and spiritual “death” that Elie has gone through during the story. The reader is not told whether Wiesel regained his faith in God, but is led to believe that he was able to survive based on his relentless love for his