Night, by Elie Wiesel

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“Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose; also the first announcement of death” (Conrad 1). From the beginning of the novel, Night, by Elie Wiesel, the protagonist Eliezer is portrayed as a very religious person, and his belief in God is absolute, but as the novels proceeds this sense of faith ends because of the circumstances Eliezer has to go through. One can infer that the changes in Eliezer’s belief were due to several reasons. This essay will be focusing on how Eliezer’s journey of the holocaust causes drastic changes of his views and beliefs in the benevolent God. Some of the reasons why Eliezer loses faith and belief in God include: the cruelty and evil that Eliezer has to witness at the German concentration camps, the selfishness that he sees from people on his journey, and the loses faces due to the war. Therefore, Elie Wiesel has attempted to portray the holocaust as the driving force for the protagonist’s disbelief in God, and has also pointed out how cruelty and evil affects Eliezer’s faith and his belief in the Benevolent. Firstly, the cruelty and evil that Eliezer has to witness at the Nazi concentration camps causes him to lose faith in God and religion. In section four, at the hanging of some treasonous Jews, Eliezer answers a man’s question of “Where is God now?” by saying “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows. . . .” (Wiesel 65) because he is trying to imply that the benevolent God has died a mortal being’s death, and is comparing God’s “Death” to the young boy Pipel’s hanging, by the Nazi soldiers. Throughout the novel, cruelty and evil of individuals causes problems through Eliezer’s journey and the only being he can blame is God. We see in section fo... ... middle of paper ... ... loses belief in God and religion include: the cruelty and evil that Eliezer has to witness at the German concentration camps, the selfishness that he observes from people on his journey, and the loses he faces due to the war. Therefore, Wiesel has tried to portray Eliezer’s struggle to maintain belief in God, as one of the key themes in the novel, and has shown that this is one of the significant reasons for the tragedy’s that Eliezer has faced throughout his journey of the holocaust. Work Cited Page • Wiesel, Elie. Night. United States: Hill and Wang, 1960, print. • Puz, Richard. Quotes about death of a loved one. Good Reads. ND. < http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/death-of-a-loved-one> Jan 2nd 2014. • Conrad, Peter. Quotes about death. Brainy quotes. ND. Jan 2nd 2014.

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