Foreshadowing In Elie Wiesel's Night

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Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, incorporates a plethora of instances where future events in the story are foreshadowed. In particular, the beginning of this book consisted of two significant instances of foreshadowing that illustrated the climax of this story. Wiesel did not shy away from incorporating subtle hints to readers at the beginning of his memoir that readers could refer to when being introduced to a major event in his memoir, and the use of this literary device has enabled readers to experience a moment of epiphany as the book progresses. The first instance where the Jews of Sighet were introduced to the events that would unfold was when Moishe the Beadle, a Jewish immigrant, escaped a concentration camp in Poland after being trapped …show more content…

The train had stopped at the station. The Jews were ordered to get off and onto the waiting trucks. The trucks headed toward the forest. There, everybody was ordered to get out. They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns.” (Wiesel, 6). Despite the alarming warnings, the Jews of Sighet turned a blind eye to the claims and invalidated Moshe the Beadle’s traumatic recollections. The particular reason for these reactions is that the Jews struggled to comprehend an unfathomable and severe circumstance. To elaborate, when Elie said, “Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns'', Moishe the Beadle was alluding to the fact that the Nazis intended on obliterating the entire Jewish demographic. They started with the children, who are the ones to develop the future generations of …show more content…

Wipe out a population dispersed throughout so many nations? So many millions of people! By what means? in the middle of the twentieth century!” (Wiesel, 8). Once more, the Jews of Sighet failed to recognize the warnings that would soon become their faith if no actions were taken. Overall, Moshe the Beadle’s stories of people dying and having to dig their graves were disregarded by the Jews of Sighet. Another foreshadowing in this book is when Madame Schachter, a woman who lost her husband, voiced her concerns about seeing a fire from the cattle train when she screamed, "I see a fire! I see flames, huge flames!" Wiesel, 25. Here, Schachter insists that she has seen a fire, though there weren’t any in sight. This led the Jews to believe that perhaps Madame Schachter was hallucinating and paranoid after she was separated from her husband. Moreover, they believed "She is hallucinating because she is thirsty, poor w o m a

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