Analysis Of Elie's True Identity In Night By Orison Swett Marden

“Every experience in life, everything with which we have come in contact in life, is a chisel which has been cutting away at our life statue, molding, modifying, shaping it. We are part of all we have met. Everything we have seen, heard, felt, or thought has had its hand and molding us, shaping us” was once said by Orison Swett Marden. Marden refers to how the different experiences encountered through life are all parts that make up one's true identity. Life is filled with many challenges and experiences that affect and change the type of individual one is. In the novella Night Elie’s personal encounters from his childhood, his time in Nazi captivity within the concentration camps and after the liberation of the concentration camps, contribute

The Nazis tortured the Jews so much that Elie has lost faith in his God and has become a less faithful Jew. During his time in Auschwitz, he is overcome by a feeling of emptiness; he could care less whether he lives or dies. The most important theme in the autobiographical novella Night is that experiences in one's life can change and pave the way of one's true identity.

Before and during his time in the concentration camps, Elie was stripped of his identity and his humanity. Hitler's ultimate goal in World War II was to create an Aryan empire consisting of blond haired and blue eyed Germans, which meant all Jews, homosexuals, disabled people and many other races had to be demolished. Hitler and the Nazi soldiers treated the jewish prisoners like they were animals rather than human beings. When Elie first arrives at birkenau he is welcomed by an overwhelming sense of death. The first thing he sees is “flames. In the air, the

Elie survived the camps for nearly two years claiming he gave up on survival, however it wasn't until the passing of his father, he truly felt as though there was no reason to live. Elie says "I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like- free at last" (106). After the death of his father, Elie loses the ability to care for his own life, and loses the little hope in survival he has. After the camps were liberated by the Americans, Elie never had thoughts about being free, or family; only of food. Elie says “Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. We thought only of that. Not of revenge, not of our families. Nothing but bread.” Despite all the cruel and inhumane things the Nazis did to Elie and millions of other Jews, he felt so empty that his only thought was of bread. Three days after the liberation, Elie became very ill with some serious type of poisoning. For weeks he struggled between life and death. One day when he had enough power and energy to walk, he wanted to look at himself in the mirror. He hasn't seen himself “since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as