Night Analysis

Feeling lost when one doesn’t even know them self or when one doesn’t know what to stand for or believe in anymore is exactly how Elie Wiesel felt in his book “Night”. During the time of the Holocaust, Elie was one of the victims taken into a concentration camp and forced to work to brutal extents. As a kid, Elie was determined to learn and study his religion, but that changed, along with his priorities. Devastating events changed Elie’s idea on religion, battling conflicts between himself and those around him, even the test that God seemed to implicate on Elie. To his own disbelief, Elie had given up on God and had lost his faith due to his immense struggle throughout the year he spent in the camp, carrying the burden that he does not care about the one he had always looked up too and been there for him, which is God.

Once Elie was in the concentration camp, Auschwitz, he felt as if his life was a dream because he claimed it was too surreal to be reality. Elie held strong to his religion, looking towards God when trouble neared him. God had always been Elie’s escape, and according to Elie, that wasn’t going to change. Yet, the time came when the sturdy structure where Elie’s faith stood was starting to erode. Elie had also been battling himself, creating mental conflicts. When men spoke of God, Elie argued with himself about how he felt about Him. Elie said, “As for me, I ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice (45).” He did not know how to feel about religion because he still wanted God to protect him, but he wasn’t sure if He was going to be just in protecting him. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Elie had fought his last battle with himself about his fait...

... middle of paper ...

... Elie gives up his faith completely. Elie conflicted himself numerous times, trying to hold onto the last bit of his life before it took a turn for the worse—his connection to God.

Elie is an ever-changing character: his struggle for his faith and conflicting himself about it, his struggle between his faith and the other inmates, and his struggle between God and his relation to Job; even though the underlying conflicts are between Elie and God solely. Elie had once believed that God was the almighty and contained all of the higher power. But, as the concentration camps changed multiple people mentally and physically, the camps had changed Elie too. No matter how strong Elie had once believed in God, that strong belief had dimmed down to a dull minimum, a slim-to-nothing belief left behind. They say change is for the better, but that always isn’t the case.