The picaresque genre is known for characters changing in a harsh world in order to survive. Stuart Miller, a picaresque expert, says, “Picaro’s one constant trait is his will to live, he will live any way he can” (Miller 71). The world is sinister where characters move from master to master, lose their humanity and loyalty, and struggle with faith in a world where fortune reigns supreme. Elie Wiesel’s Night exemplifies the traits of a picaresque novel as Elie attempts to survive in the dark, unforgiving world becoming a picaro. As he is moved from camp to camp, Elie loses his humanity and loyalty while his faith is challenged as fortune becomes the true god.
In Night, Elie loses his humanity as he moves from one horror to another.
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Life is chaos for Elie as he is transported to camps and changes to survive. As Elie moves from one location to another, the ideals of humanity begin to falter and dissipate as the desire for survival takes hold. After Elie and his family move into the Ghetto, Elie is still at the beginning of his journey and still holds on to the ideals of hope and justice. While one portion of the Ghetto relocates to a concentration camp, Elie and his sisters show their humanity: " We helped as best as we could" (16). However, Elie changes as the Jewish citizens of the Ghetto are forced to leave: "There they went, defeated, their bundles, their lives, in tow, having left their homes, their childhood. They passed me by, like beaten dogs, with never a glance in my direction" (17). This total destruction of Elie’s world causes the construction of the picaresque world. Elie realizes that his world changes into a picaresque pit of despair. Elie's condition further changes as Elie is transported to his first camp. Elie whiteness the abuse of Mrs. Schachter: “She received several blows to the head, blows that could have been lethal” (26), Elie realizes that in order to survive he must change. Elie does not attempt to stop these horrible events. Elie's desire for survival outranks any compassionate or humane thoughts as he transforms into a picaro. In the concentration camp the next day, Elie is a different person: "I too had become a different person. The student of Talmud, the child I was, has been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded--and devoured-- by a black flame" (37). The boy, Elie, is replaced by a picaro who is willing to sacrifice anything to survive. The picaresque world transforms Elie into a picaro as seen by his loss of humanity. Elie’s loss of humanity: “is the pattern which begins our typical picaresque novel” (Miller 56). The picaresque pattern is: “The pattern of the relative innocence developing into a picaro because the worlds he meets is roguish” (Miller 56). Elie transforms into a picaro, loses his humanity and his loyalty towards others at the concentration camps. Loyalty is not held by picaros: “Protagonist does not seek any stable relation between himself and another… if he does, he is frustrated” (Miller 12). The lack of loyalty is due to the desire for survival. Elie’s picaresque nature causes a lack of loyalty towards his father and causes his father to appear a liability. Elie distances himself from his father for a better chance of survival. At the camp, Elie's father is savagely abused and Elie does not react: "My father had been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked" (Wiesel 39). The lack of compassion and feeling exemplifies Elie’s change from boy to a picaro, driven by his will to survive. A picaresque reaction has no emotion, the distancing for survival, and no loyalty. Elie's father is ill and separated, and Elie searches: "If only I didn't find him! If only I were relieved of the responsibility, I could use all my strength to fight for my own survival, to take care of only myself" (106). This act of pure abandonment is an abomination of the bond between father and son. However, for Elie, a picaro, trying to survive it is a natural reaction. The degradation of the relationship between the father and the son happens as the son transforms into a picaro. The picaro emerges in Elie with a desire for his survival over his father. After leaving, the picaresque world, Elie does not even recognize himself: "From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me" (115). Elie transforms from a loving, Jewish student, and son to a picaro concerned with his own survival. Elie is now no more than a shell of his old self that died in the flames of the picaresque world. Elie also loses his faith in a world where fortune is prevalent and faith holds any worth or power.
After Elie sees babies thrown into burning pits, Elie's memory paints a gruesome picture of the effect of seeing the atrocity: “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever… Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul" (34). The atrocities illustrate that God holds little sway over Elie’s life since fortune runs the world for the picaro. Elie's good fortune is always short lived. This is a trait that is common to picaros in the picaresque genre. The classic picaro, Lazarillo de Tormes describes his life: "out of the fryer and into the fire" this happens in Night as Elie moves from one terror to the next and good fortune is short lived in the universe of chance. Stuart Miller describes fortune for the picaro: “the picaro never achieves comic mastery of the world for long… Even in success, threat of fail exists” (Miller, 32). The inability to have good fortune for long is a problem that plagues Elie. Elie and his father are placed in the same group after being screened by the SS. Elie says, "The baton pointed to the left. I took a half step forward. I first wanted to see where they would send my father. Were he to have gone right I would have run after him. The baton, once more, moved to the left. A weight lifted from my heart… Still I was happy, I was near my father (Wiesel, 32). However, this new found joy is short lived when a fellow prisoner points out their destination: "Poor devils, you are heading for the crematorium" (32). This reversal of their luck demonstrates the picaresque nature of the world. Elie's constant reversal of his luck is shown with his teeth as well. A dentist plans on taking Elie's golden crown. However, before the surgery the dentist is hung for breaking the law: "I felt no pity for him. In fact, I was pleased with what was happening to him: my gold crown was safe" (52). This enjoyment is short
lived, not long later Elie loses his crown to Franek. Franek is moved to another camp two weeks after he receives the crown: "I had lost my crown for nothing" (56). This amount of luck causes the world to seem chaotic, as if there is no God: "'For God's sake, where is God?' And from within me I hear a voice answer: 'Where he is? That is where- hanging from this gallows…'" (65). The picaresque world is a place where God seemingly has no power over who lives and who dies. Thus Night is set in a picaresque world where chance controls the world and God can do nothing for the hopeless people inside. The novel Night is a picaresque novel that demonstrates that humanity is no more than a veil that is dropped when the conditions change. Night shows a world where people are solely focused on their own survival as they travel from one hell to another. Humanity does not survive through faith, but by becoming like its surroundings. As the ideals of humanity, loyalty, and civilized faith are systematically destroyed in the picaresque world of Night, the young Elie turns into a picaro with little human values, no loyalty, and a diminished appreciation of God’s wisdom. Elie, the ideal model of a picaro, confirms that the desire for survival will overtake the tempered views of humanity in a hostile, picaresque world such as Night. This affirms Stuart Miller: “The picaresque genre is ugly; it speaks of the possibilities of human degradation rather than human triumph” (Miller, 72). The novel Night shows the degradation and transformation of Elie: "From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me" (115). Night is a realistic interpretation of the effects a picaresque world would have on humanity as seen by Elie who transforms from a loving, Jewish student, and son to a picaro concerned with his own survival.
Samuels starts out explaining the background of Elie, a child who has a great love for religion. Then, Nazis come and occupy his native town of Sighet. Although held captured and clueless to where they were going, the Jews were indeed optimistic. They had no reason not to be, the Nazis were treating them as they were of importance. However, the optimism was to come to a halt. After arresting the Jewish leader, the Jews were sent to ghettos, then into camps. It wasn't until they reached Auschwitz where Elie for the first time smelt burning flesh. Then the eight words that Elie couldn't forget, "Men to the left! Women to the right!" He was then left with his father, who for the whole trip he would depend on to survive. It was this, in which made him lose his religiousness. In the months to come Elie and his father lived like animals. Tragically, in the end his father past away, and to amazement Elie had not wept. Samuels did an overall remarkable job on this review; however, there were still some parts that could have been improved.
Elie Wiesel writes about his personal experience of the Holocaust in his memoir, Night. He is a Jewish man who is sent to a concentration camp, controlled by an infamous dictator, Hitler. Elie is stripped away everything that belongs to him. All that he has worked for in his life is taken away from him instantly. He is even separated from his mother and sister. On the other side of this he is fortunate to survive and tell his story. He describes the immense cruel treatment that he receives from the Nazis. Even after all of the brutal treatment and atrocities he experiences he does not hate the world and everything in it, along with not becoming a brute.
A statement from the nonfiction novella Night –a personal account of Elie Wiesel’s experience during the Holocaust—reads as follows: “How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou. Almighty, Master of the universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end up in the furnaces” (67). War is a concept that is greatly looked down upon in most major religions and cultures, yet it has become an inevitable adversity of human nature. Due to war’s inhumane circumstances and the mass destruction it creates, it has been a major cause for many followers of Christianity, Judaism, and other religions to turn from their faith. Followers of religion cannot comprehend how their loving god could allow them to suffer and many devout
Night by Elie Wiesel was a memoir on one of the worst things to happen in human history, the Holocaust. A terrible time where the Nazi German empire started to take control of eastern Europe during WWII. This book tells of the terrible things that happened to the many Jewish people of that time. This time could easily change grown men, and just as easily a boy of 13. Elie’s relationship with God and his father have been changed forever thanks to the many atrocities committed at that time.
In Elie Wiesel’s Night, he recounts his horrifying experiences as a Jewish boy under Nazi control. His words are strong and his message clear. Wiesel uses themes such as hunger and death to vividly display his days during World War II. Wiesel’s main purpose is to describe to the reader the horrifying scenes and feelings he suffered through as a repressed Jew. His tone and diction are powerful for this subject and envelope the reader. Young readers today find the actions of Nazis almost unimaginable. This book more than sufficiently portrays the era in the words of a victim himself.
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.
Inked on the pages of Elie Wiesel’s Night is the recounting of him, a young Jewish boy, living through the mass genocide that was the Holocaust. The words written so eloquently are full of raw emotions depict his journey from a simple Jewish boy to a man who was forced to see the horrors of the world. Within this time period, between beatings and deaths, Wiesel finds himself questioning his all loving and powerful God. If his God loved His people, then why would He allow such a terrible thing to happen? Perhaps Wiesel felt abandoned by his God, helpless against the will of the Nazis as they took everything from him.
Every man, woman, and child has his or her breaking point, no matter how hard they try to hold it back. In Night by Elie Wiesel the main theme of the entire book is the human living condition. The quality of human life is overwhelming because humans have the potential to make amazing discoveries that help all humans. Elie Wiesel endures some of the most cruel living conditions known to mankind. This essay describes the themes of faith, survival, and conformity in Night by Elie Wiesel.
“Even in darkness, it is possible to create light”(Wiesel). In Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, the author, as a young boy who profoundly believed in his religion, experiences the life of a prisoner in the Holocaust. He struggles to stay with his father while trying to survive. Through his experience, he witnesses the changes in his people as they fight each other for themselves. He himself also notices the change within himself. In Night, it is discovered that atrocities and cruel treatment can make decent people into brutes. Elie himself also shows signs of becoming a brute for his survival, but escapes this fate, which is shown through his interactions with his father.
It is reported that over 6 million Jews were brutally murdered in the Holocaust, but there were a very few who were able to reach the liberation, and escape alive. There were many important events that occurred in Elie Wiesel’s Night, and for each and every event, I was equally, if not more disturbed than the one before. The first extremely disturbing event became a reality when Eliezer comprehended that there were trucks filled with babies that the Nazi’s were throwing the children into the crematorium. Unfortunately, the sad truth of the murdering babies was clearly presented through, “Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there, […] babies”, (Wiesel, Night, 32). This was one of the most disturbing events of the narrative for myself and truly explained the cruelty and torture of the Holocaust.
When the holocaust concluded, the long night finished. However, the terrors and haunting memories of the Holocaust will forever linger. After the prisoners were beaten endlessly, worked like slaves, witnessed acts of inhumanity and gave up body parts for their lives, Elie changed. The young man lost his faith, innocence, and Elies main focus became the survival of himself and father. Through Wiesel’s horrific experiences, he lost many things but gained the will and ability to persevere. All in all, Night is a book that will never be forgotten. Wiesel wrote the memoir to guarantee remembrance of the discrimination and inhumanity during the holocaust to ensure a similar event will never transpire again.
Elie’s loss of innocence and childhood lifestyle is very pronounced within the book, Night. This book, written by the main character, Elie Wiesel, tells the readers about the experiences of Mr. Wiesel during the Holocaust. The book starts off by describing Elie’s life in his hometown, Sighet, with his family and friends. As fascism takes over Hungary, Elie and his family are sent north, to Auschwitz concentration camp. Elie stays with his father and speaks of his life during this time. Later, after many stories of the horrors and dehumanizing acts of the camp, Elie and his father make the treacherous march towards Gliewitz. Then they are hauled to Buchenwald by way of cattle cars in extremely deplorable conditions, even by Holocaust standards. The book ends as Elie’s father is now dead and the American army has liberated them. As Elie is recovering in the hospital he gazes at himself in a mirror, he subtly notes he much he has changed. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie loses his innocence and demeanour because he was traumatized by what he saw in the camps, his loss of faith in a God who stood idly by while his people suffered, and becoming selfish as he is forced to become selfish in the death camps to survive.
“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart” (Kahlil). People focus more on the outward appearance instead of the inward appearance. One’s inward appearance is comprised of their character, values, morals, and the true nature of their heart. On the other hand, the outward appearance is composed of one’s dress and grooming. The inward and outward appearance determines whether or not a person is ugly or beautiful. The choices that we make also define whether or not one is ugly or beautiful; choices made in the past can sometimes be repeated in the future.
Elie goes to Auschwitz at an innocent, young stage in his life. Due to his experiences at this concentration camp, he loses his faith, his bond with his father, and his innocence. Situations as horrendous as the Holocaust will drastically change people, no matter what they were like before the event, and this is evident with Elie's enormous change throughout the memoir Night.
After a brief stay at Auschwitz, they are moved to a new camp, Buna. At Buna, Elie goes through the dehumanizing process of the concentration camps. Both he and his father experience severe beatings at the hand of the kapos. All the prisoners are overworked and undernourished. Many lose faith in God, including Elie. He witnesses several hangings, one of a boy with an angelic face, and sees him struggle for over thirty minutes fighting for his life. To a stranger's cry of "Where is God now?", Elie answers: "He is hanging here on this gallows...." (p. 62). As Elie witnesses the hanging of the young pipel, he feels that it is his God who is hanging on the gallows. Elie i...