Examples Of Oppression In Night By Elie Wiesel

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Jay Patel 4th Period Honors English II Ms. Austin 26 October 2023 Silenced by Shadows: Unveiling Oppression in Night. Imagine the unimaginable: stripped of humanity, crammed into a cattle car, and driven for days without sustenance. This nightmarish ordeal was the reality for millions during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust, describes his horrific ordeal and his experiences as a teen in great detail through the eye-opening memoir, Night. Wiesel, a fifteen-year-old boy in Sighet, Transylvania (modern-day Romania), endured unspeakable horrors in concentration camps after being taken by soldiers, including bereavement, abuse, and extreme starvation. This narrative employs numerous literary devices that connect to the theme …show more content…

In one instance, when everyone arrived at the Auschwitz camp for the first time, they received the brilliant news, “There was a labor camp on site”. The conditions were good, and the weather was good. Families would not be separated.” (Wiesel 27). This quote demonstrates irony due to the fact that later in this novel, they receive treatment opposite to what they had expected, treatment worse than the rest of the camps and experiences they have ever faced in their lives. None of these conditions were met in the slightest; instead, they were further dehumanized and subjected to more torture. Additional instances of irony in Wiesel’s writing can be found here. On one occasion, Wiesel and the other prisoners were marching between two barracks, and the ones who fell behind in the march were beaten brutally. Inscriptions everywhere stated, ‘WARNING! DANGER OF DEATH!’, where in response to reading this sign, Elie comments, “Was there here a single place where one was not in danger of death?” (Wiesel 40). This quote proves the extreme irony of warning someone about something that is already apparent in this context: certain death, revealing the severe oppression imposed on these unfortunate victims. Elie Wiesel’s use of figurative language significantly emphasizes the intense agony and misery he and the other victims faced in the tormenting concentration camps, during one of the darkest and cruelest times in history. Wiesel uses various examples of personification, to compare human characteristics to his experiences in the Holocaust, as in his statement of death ‘suffocating’ him, expressing the intensity and cruelty of his final march. He provides numerous examples of similes to make striking comparisons, to express the dehumanizing treatment they received, as in the comparison of ‘rags’ to how these workers were

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