Scope, Despair, And Memory Elie Wiesel Analysis

In ¨Hope, Despair, and Memory¨ a lecture by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel talks about a few significant memories. He is a holocaust survivor, he wrote this speech and won a Nobel Peace prize. He takes his readers back in time by using imagery. Some know, memory is a powerful tool, Wiesel uses this tool in this text. As you continue to read, think of where you would be without memory.
Towards the beginning of the speech, Wiesel speaks about the Besht and his servant. The Besht and his servant were punished, which ended up having them be banned. The servant had forgotten everything, whereas the Besht forgot everything but the alphabet. So, they both started to chant the alphabet, over and over and over, slowly but surely, the Besht got his powers back, “Memory

saved the Besht, and if anything can, it is memory that will save humanity.

For me, hope without memory is like memory without hope” (pg. 2, para. 3). This suggests that memory is one of the most powerful tools, one our whole race cannot live without. Wiesel uses imagery to develop the central idea. This can be seen in the following line, “Like the body, memory protects its wounds. When the day breaks after a sleepless night, one’s ghosts must withdraw; the dead are ordered back to their graves” (pg. 4, para. 10). This quote shows imagery and the central idea, the image is, after a sleepless night ghosts would withdraw and the dead go back to their graves. Wiesel also used repetition in “Hope, Despair, and Memory”. This can be seen in the following line, “After the war we reassured ourselves that it would be enough to relate a single night in Treblinka, to tell of the cruelty, the senselessness of murder, and the outrage born of indifference: it would be enough to find the right word and the propitious moment to say it, to shake humanity out of its indifference and keep the torturer from torturing ever again. We thought it would be enough to read the world a poem written by a child in the Theresienstadt ghetto to ensure

that no child anywhere would ever again have to endure hunger or fear. It would be enough to describe a death-camp “selection”, to prevent the human right to dignity from ever being violated again” (pg. 6, para. 19). This quote shows the writing strategies of repetition and imagery, the repeated statement is “it would be enough”, and you can imagine what goes on in this paragraph.
In ¨Hope, Despair, and Memory¨ a lecture by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel begins the lecture with memories. He is a survivor of the holocaust, he won a Nobel Prize by writing this speech. He uses imagery by bringing his readers back in time. You now know that memory is a powerful tool, and that Wiesel uses this tool in this text. As you finish reading, think about what point got through to you.