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Theme of change in night by elie wiesel
Theme of change in night by elie wiesel
Theme of change in night by elie wiesel
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Everyone deals with the loss of faith, at least once in their life. Whether a person loses a family member or is just having a strenuous time in life. Anyone can lose faith. In the book Night, by Elie Wiesel, there are many examples that show a loss of faith. Throughout the story, Elie struggles with his faith a lot. Even from the first day he got to the concentration camp, he noticed a change in himself and knew that he was losing his faith already. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses repetition, diction, and tone to illustrate how his time in the concentration camps had an effect on his faith.
Elie Wiesel and his family are taken from their home in 1944. From the day they leave until the day Elie is liberated, a lot happens. During the year he is there he faces many hardships that cost him his father's
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life and his faith.
Elie struggles with his faith all of the time. The first day in the concentration camp is the first time that Elie questions God. When they see the crematorium he says “For the first time I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, eternal and terrible master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?”(page 33). This passage epitomizes repetition because Elie writes some form of God into every sentence. He is writing about God and repeats his name, he just uses different names for Him each time he mentions God. Another example of repetition in the book Night, is when Elie describes his first night in camp and how he will never forget it. He says, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. 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. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that
deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams into ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.”(pg 34). The exerpt stated expresses repetition because every line in the quote starts with “Never shall I forget…” and then continues on to what he will never forget. In this paragraph, Elie demonstrates how in just one night he had already lost faith in God. These are just a few of the many examples of repetition in Night that express a loss of faith. Another hardship that Elie must face is seeing the deaths of other people in the camp every day. This has a great effect on Elie’s faith. One day all the prisoners are taken to watch a young pipel be hung. In this particular event, other people are starting to lose their faith as well as Elie. Elie writes, “You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name!”(pg 68). While Elie writes this, he exhibits the literary device called tone. Tone is the attitude of the writer towards the audience. It represents tone because in this moment, Elie is writing with anger. Elie is angry at God because he has allowed everything that the Nazi’s were doing to them to happen. Elie realizes that he is losing his faith quickly. In addition, Elie writes, “What are you, my God? I thought angrily. How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith, their anger, their defiance? What does Your grandeur mean, Master of the Universe, in the face of all this cowardice, this decay, and this misery? Why do you go on troubling these poor people’s wounded minds, their ailing bodies?”(pg 66). In this case, Elies portrays tone because he is angry with God and does not believe that God is with him. He asks how can there be a God if all of these terrible things are happening around him. He doesn't know how God could just sit and watch a thing like this happen. Elie displays that he already has lost most of his faith. While Elie is in the concentration camps, he witnesses many deaths of those around him. One very important death was when the young pipel was hung. He thinks, in answer to another man, “Where He is? This is where - hanging here from this gallows… That night the soup tasted of corpses”(65). This demonstrates the literary device of diction. Diction is the style of writing or word choice that a writer uses in a story. It models diction because Elie uses the word corpses to describe the taste of the soup, which provides a great demonstration of how the hanging had an effect on him. Another example of diction is when Elie writes, “I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against him.”(pg 69). Presumably, this is an example of diction because when he used the words rebellion and protest against him, it exhibited that Elie practically did not believe in God at all anymore. His faith was lost slowly until there wasn't much left to lose. In Night there are many kinds of literary devices used. Some that Elie Wiesel uses to illustrate how his faith was lost during the Holocaust were repetition, tone, and diction. He used these to show that the Holocaust not only had an effect physically, but also emotionally with his faith. In Night Elie lost his faith fast. Even he was surprised at the toll it took on him. However, this experience is something he will never forget and he probably will never be able to think about God in the same way again.
Many may have heard of Elie Wiesel as the author of the book called Night or as the person that survived the Holocaust. When reading Night, there are many question can be ask about the book. One of the question is, what are mankind's greatest mistake? After finish the book Night, mankind’s greatest mistake we're letting the Holocaust happen, kill many Jews, and treat Jews terribly.
He was always contemplating the existence of God. On page 69, while supper is being served and the Jews are supposed to be fasting because of Yom Kippur, this Jewish holiday would require them to fast, Elie’s father required him to eat because it was too risky for Elie to starve or become sick if he didn’t. Elie then says, “And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast.” “I no longer accepted God’s silence.” Elie here is giving up hope and showing signs of distress, which is completely reasonable considering all the deaths they are witnessing a day.
The first example of Elie loosing his faith is when he arrived at Auschwitz. Elie and his father are directed to go to the left. A prisoner then informs them that they are on their way to the crematory. Elie's father recites the Kaddish or prayer for the dead.
Night is an autobiography by a man named Eliezer Wiesel. The autobiography is a quite disturbing record of Elie’s childhood in the Nazi death camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald during world war two. While Night is Elie Wiesel’s testimony about his experiences in the Holocaust, Wiesel is not, precisely speaking, the story’s protagonist. Night is narrated by a boy named Eliezer who represents Elie, but details set apart the character Eliezer from the real life Elie. For instance, Eliezer wounds his foot in the concentration camps, while Elie actually wounded his knee. Wiesel fictionalizes seemingly unimportant details because he wants to distinguish his narrator from himself. It is almost impossibly painful for a survivor to write about his Holocaust experience, and the mechanism of a narrator allows Wiesel to distance himself somewhat from the experience, to look in from the outside.
Family and Adversity It is almost unimaginable the difficulties victims of the holocaust faced in concentration camps. For starters they were abducted from their homes and shipped to concentration camps in tightly packed cattle cars. Once they made it to a camp, a selection process occurred. The males were separated from the females.
Wiesel’s community at the beginning of the story is a little town in Transylvania where the Jews of Sighet are living. It’s called “The Jewish Community of Sighet”. This is where he spent his childhood. By day he studied Talmud and at night he ran to the synagogue to shed tears over the destruction of the Temple. His world is a place where Jews can live and practice Judaism. As a young boy who is thirteen at the beginning of the story, I am very impressed with his maturity. For someone who is so young at the time he is very observant of his surroundings and is very good at reading people. In the beginning he meets Moishe the Beadle. Moishe is someone who can do many different types of work but he isn’t considered qualified at any of those jobs in a Hasidic house of prayer (shtibl). For some reason, though young Elie is fascinated with him. He meets Moishe the Beadle in 1941. At the time Elie really wants to explore the studies of Kabbalah. One day he asks his father to find him a master so he can pursue this interest. But his father is very hesitant about this idea and thinks young E...
However, there were warnings by some people that Jewish people were being deported and killed. Although no one believes these warnings, Elie and his family are taken to a ghetto where they have no food. After being in the ghetto, Elie and his father were separated from Elie’s mother and sister because of selection and were placed in cattle cars where they had no room. They are taken to Auschwitz where they suffer from hunger, beatings, and humiliation from the guards which causes Elie’s father to become weak. By now Elie has lost his faith in God because of all he has been through.
The novel Night demonstrates that the human spirit can be affected by the power of false hope, by religion, and that one will do whatever it will take to survive for oneself and family.
The Holocaust was a test of faith for all the Jews that were involved. There were several instances in the book Night when Elie’s faith was hindered. Not only was his faith in God tested, but also his faith in himself and his fellow man. Although the trials of the Holocaust were detrimental to Elie’s faith at the time, a number of the Jews’ strengthened by the test. Whenever the Holocaust began, Elie was very young and wasn’t sure what to believe or understand everything yet, causing him to go back and forth on how he felt and what he believed. The people around him were a tremendous impact on what he was thinking and believing. The state that people came out of the Holocaust heavily depended on who they were when they went in and what they
The theme of Night is resilience. To be resilient is to be strong and able to bounce back when things happen. Elie shows resilience many times throughout the course of Night, and some of these times included when Elie and his block are being forced to run to the new camp, when somebody attempts to kill him and when he loses his father to sickness. When Elie is with the group of people running to the new camp, he knows that he needs to persevere and be resilient, even when the person that he is talking to gives up (Wiesel 86). Elie tries to tell somebody that they need to keep going, and that it will not be much longer, but when they give up, Elie does not seem to pity the boy, and he stays strong. Somebody also attempted to strangle Elie while
In the final moments of Night, Elie has been broken down to only the most basic ideas of humanity; survival in it of itself has become the only thing left for him to cling to. After the chain of unfortunate events that led to his newfound solitude after his father’s abrupt death, Elie “thought only to eat. [He] thought not of [his] father, or [his] mother” (113). He was consumed with the ideas of survival, so he repeatedly only expressed his ideas of gluttony rather than taking the time to consider what happened to his family. The stress of survival allocated all of Elie’s energy to that cause alone. Other humanistic feelings like remorse, love, and faith were outcast when they seemed completely unimportant to his now sole goal of survival. The fading of his emotions was not sudden mishap though; he had been worn away with time. Faith was one of the most prominent key elements in Elie’s will to continue, but it faded through constant. During the hanging of a young boy Elie heard a man call to the crowd pleading, “Where is merciful God, where is He?” (64). It snapped Elie’s resolve. From this point on, he brought up and questioned his faith on a regular basis. Afterwards, most other traits disappeared like steam after a fire is extinguished. Alone in the wet embers the will to survive kept burning throughout the heart ache. When all else is lost, humans try to survive for no reason other than to survive, and Wiesel did survive. He survived with mental scars that persisted the ten long years of his silence. Even now after his suffering has, Elie continues to constantly repeat the word never throughout his writing. To write his memoir he was forced to reopen the lacerations the strains of survival left inside his brain. He strongly proclaims, “Never shall I forget that night...Never shall I forget the smoke...Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the
Eliezer loses faith in god. He struggles physically and mentally for life and no longer believes there is a god. "Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my god and my soul and turned my dreams to dust..."(pg 32). Elie worked hard to save himself and asks god many times to help him and take him out of his misery. "Why should I bless his name? The eternal, lord of the universe, the all-powerful and terrible was silent..."(pg 31). Eliezer is confused, because he does not know why the Germans would kill his face, and does not know why god could let such a thing happen. "I did not deny god's existence, but I doubted his absolute justice..."(pg 42). These conditions gave him confidence, and courage to live.
As humans, we require basic necessities, such as food, water, and shelter to survive. But we also need a reason to live. The reason could be the thought of a person, achieving some goal, or a connection with a higher being. Humans need something that drives them to stay alive. This becomes more evident when people are placed in horrific situations. In Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, he reminisces about his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust. There the men witness horrific scenes of violence and death. As time goes on they begin to lose hope in the very things that keep them alive: their faith in God, each other, and above all, themselves.
In the beginning of the memoir, Elie is an extremely passionate and devout Jew, but as the story progresses, Elie sees horrendous things in the concentration camps, and as a result, he slowly loses his faith. Elie displays his extreme devotion in the beginning stages of the memoir when he states, “By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple. I cried because something inside me felt the need to cry” (Wiesel 4). Elie is clearly very fond of learning more about his religion and connecting to God in a spiritual way. Furthermore, Elie is only thirteen years old, so when he says he cries because he feels the need to cry, he is exhibiting incredible passion. Elie reveals signs of change and begins to lose his faith in God just a few moments after arriving at the concentration camp when he says, “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes” (Wiesel 34). Elie exclaims that he cannot worship God anymore due to the awful things he has seen at Auschwitz. He does not want to believe in the being that could have allowed these awful events to happen. This is a completely different Elie from the loving and caring Elie in the ghetto. Elie also uses rep...
Night is a memoir written by Elie Wiesel, a young Jewish boy, who tells of his experiences during the Holocaust. Elie is a deeply religious boy whose favorite activities are studying the Talmud and spending time at the Temple with his spiritual mentor, Moshe the Beadle. At an early age, Elie has a naive, yet strong faith in God. But this faith is tested when the Nazi's moves him from his small town.