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Themes in the book night by elie wiesel
Essay on the book night by elie wiesel
Themes in the book night by elie wiesel
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During the 1930’s, The Holocaust physically, mentally, and emotionally scarred the lives of all mankind. Elie Wiesel is one of the few who has been able to turn his tragic experience as a concentration camp survivor into a memoir. Although Wiesel’s story isn’t like many others, his use of diction influences the tone and meaning of the story; Wiesel’s attitude in the book is calm, shocking, and thoughtful; capturing attention and spreading awareness to readers all around the world.
Elie Wiesel remains calm and placid throughout the story. His particular state of mind carries a captivating feeling that stays with you throughout the story. In page 92 Wiesel states, “ I was walking in a cemetery, among stiffened corpses, logs of wood. Not a cry of distress, not a groan, nothing but a mass of agony, in silence. No one asked anyone for help. You died because you had to die. There was no fuss. “ This quote shows how accustomed and familiar Wiesel has grown to death and the decease of those around him. The way Wiesel describes
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the most disturbing settings with such calmness and assurance gives off an eerie and frightening feel to the story. Elie Wiesel also tells shocking stories of what happened to him inside the concentration camps.
His unbelievable stories truly grasp the reader's mind and inform the reader of what is life in Elie’s memory. For instance, in page 65 Wiesel tells the story; “ A-7713! “ I stepped forward. “ A crate! “ he ordered. They brought a crate. “ Lie down on it! On your belly! “ I obeyed. I no longer felt anything except the lashes of the whip… “ Twenty-four… twenty-five!“ I had not realized it but i had fainted… I was still lying on the crate… “ Stand up! “ … “ Listen to me you son of a swine! so much for your curiosity. You shall receive five times more if you dare tell anyone what you saw! “ Wiesel receives this harsh punishment for accidentally seeing Idek, The Kapo having sexual relations with a polish girl. This is only one of the horrifying experiences Wiesel had to live through during The Holocaust and will forever haunt his
mind. After all that has happened to Elie as a concentration camp survivor, he still remains thoughtful and careful towards the ones he loves. It makes a good impression to the reader that Wiesel does not choose revenge after everything that has been done to him. In page 111 Eli says, “ … I cleared a way for myself to the coffee cauldron. And i managed to carry back a cupful. I had a sip. The rest was for him. I can't forget the light of thankfulness in his eyes while he gulped it down… with those few gulps of hot water, I probably brought him more satisfaction than i had done during my whole childhood. “ This quote shows how much appreciation and motivation Wiesel has for his father, after all, he is all that he has left. The fact that Wiesel is still able to maintain his optimistic mindset after being tortured for so many years is an inspiration to me and many of those who have read ‘Night’.
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.
Six million Jews died during World War II by the Nazi army under Hitler who wanted to exterminate all Jews. In Night, Elie Wiesel, the author, recalls his horrifying journey through Auschwitz in the concentration camp. This memoir is based off of Elie’s first-hand experience in the camp as a fifteen year old boy from Sighet survives and lives to tell his story. The theme of this memoir is man's inhumanity to man. The cruel events that occurred to Elie and others during the Holocaust turned families and others against each other as they struggled to survive Hitler's and the Nazi Army’s inhumane treatment.
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.
One rhetorical feature that Elie Wiesel uses effectively is pathos. By including the story of the young boy and his journey, the audience gets a sense of somberness about the events that took place and the situations the Jews were put into. When the young boy says, “Tell me, what have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?” he is questioning Wiesel about the impact he has made in the world. Those questions make the audience wonder what they have done to help the oppressed and all those who have perished. This part of the speech makes the audience feel a sense of grief so strong, that they are moved to help him in his fight against the people who have forgotten and the people who have stayed silent.
“From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me never left me” (115). It is important to note what the author tries to get at here. Every time he sees himself, he remembers that he had died. The experiences, the brutality, the inhumanity feel as if he should have been killed. Another example of this is when he first enters Auschwitz. “The beloved objects we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and with them, finally, our illusions.” (29). This quote not only foreshadows a loss of hope and a near end, but the words Wiesel uses in this paragraph really are responsible for its insinuation. He tells readers that, at this point, nothing they had brought with them could keep them from the truth; the truth they were about to
Most people have never experienced anything near as awful as what Wiesel experienced. He was one of the only people who found a way to hold onto their faith. Many made excuses not to perform rituals and eventually lost all faith. Wiesel was weakened, but remained faithful. Akiba Drumer, a friend of Wiesel, tried to convince himself that it was a test by God. However, Akiba also lost faith. “Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.” (Wiesel 34) This quote was from a small portion of Wiesel’s “Never Shall I Forget Poem.” It showed how Elie lost faith in God when he saw what the Nazis were doing to families and children. This quote shows how the religious part of Elie was “murdered.” Elie seemed to become foreign and isolated from his people. He seemed to be just going through the motions during his time in the camps. “In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.” (Mauriac XXI) This quote shows how Wiesel felt like he was a stranger to the religion, community, and faith. Elie Wiesel couldn’t understand why God would hurt people, and most of all why he was spared. “And question of questions: Where was God in all this? It seemed as impossible to conceive of Auschwitz with God as to conceive of Auschwitz without God.” (Hope, Despair and Memory) This shows how Wiesel couldn’t grasp the reasoning behind God. He wanted
“How old he had grown since the night before! His body was completely twisted, shriveled up into itself. His eyes were petrified, his lips withered, decayed.”(Wiesel 79) Chlomo -Wiesel’s father -changed emotionally and physically. He was put through incredible labor along with other prisoners and started to forget why it was important to survive. “‘I can’t go on.… This is the end…. I’m going to die here….’”(Wiesel
Elie Wiesel has gone through more in life than any of us could ever imagine. One of my favorite quotes from him says, “To forget a holocaust is to kill twice.” In his novel “Night” we are given an in-depth look at the pure evil that was experienced during the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. We see as Wiesel goes from a faithful, kind Jewish boy to a survivor. As he experiences these events they change him drastically. We first see a boy with a feeling of hope and ignorance as his hometown is occupied and he’s moved into the ghettos. Then as he’s transferred to a concentration camp he questions his faith and slowly loses a sense of who he once was. But all of this puts him in an important position, he knows that he must share with the world what
Many themes exist in Night, Elie Wiesel’s nightmarish story of his Holocaust experience. From normal life in a small town to physical abuse in concentration camps, Night chronicles the journey of Wiesel’s teenage years. Neither Wiesel nor any of the Jews in Sighet could have imagined the horrors that would befall them as their lives changed under the Nazi regime. The Jews all lived peaceful, civilized lives before the German occupation. Eliezer Wiesel was concerned with mysticism and his father was “more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin” (4).
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.
Even after he loses his faith, his father proves to be a reason worth living.... ... middle of paper ... ... The other prisoners are getting fed up with his father’s behavior and are beating him, and Wiesel did nothing to stop it.
It also shows extreme resilience when Elie’s father passes away. Elie remains living as he did before, and he does not shed a single tear, showing that he is being resilient (Wiesel 112). For a teenager to be as resilient as Elie is through a time like this is astonishing considering anyone else probably would not have been able to keep going when they had to run past the point of exhaustion and act completely normal at a time when his father passes away. Elie Wiesel wrote the book in a way that it showed just how cruel it was, and it allowed the readers to see that this is a serious thing and that it needs to be made sure that it does not happen again. He wanted readers to take away from it exactly what happened within his story, and be fully aware of what went
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
In Night, Elie Wiesel descriptively portrays the Holocaust and the experiences he has in each part of his survival. From the ghettos to the Death March and liberation, Elie Wiesel shares his story of sadness and suffering. Specifically Wiesel speaks about his short experience in the Sighet ghetto, a historically accurate recount illustrating the poor living conditions, the Judenrat and Jewish life in the ghetto as well as the design and purpose of the two Sighet ghettos. Wiesel’s description of the Sighet ghettos demonstrates the similar characteristics between the Sighet ghetto and other ghettos in Germany and in German-annexed territories.