Conflict In Ellie Wiesel's 'Night'

Shaw Helfrich

Raspberry

Class 4 1/12/23

Night Essay

Conflict is something everyone deals with in their daily lives. People walk through life making choices that cause conflicts. Religion is something everyone is judged by because people think that whatever they believe is the right thing. There was an event called the holocaust, where the Jewish religion was highly discriminated against by Hitler and the Nazi party. In Night by Ellie Wiesel, Ellie struggles with external physical abuse, and his inner struggle with his faith, revealing that his identity has been formed in religion. Ellie’s physical abuse in Auschwitz shaped his religion, thereby shaping his identity as an unhealthy Jew. Ellie's father had a conversation with one of the

He had faith in his God but his own father was getting beaten in front of his own eyes. This correlates with his religion because Ellie was not the same; he loved his father but the conflict of feeling disconnected from his religion made him feel lost and not know what to do. He reacted based strictly on his inner emotions. In the Jewish religion, people are not supposed to react based on emotion, but rather rely on the religion and taking a religion based action. Religious based actions are actions people take inorder to remain faithful to their God. The camps had shaped Ellies Identity from a healthy person in his identity into someone angry and pessimistic about what was going on. Another example of physical abuse that changed Ellie was when he was on the train and the old man was struggling to stay alive as, “He collapsed but his fist was still clutching a small crust. He wanted to raise it to his mouth but the other threw himself on him.”(101) This act of physical violence changed Ellie to accept death and not see it as something irregular. This is where Ellie's identity shifted further away from the Jewish religion because people are not wired to accept death it's

When Ellie gets angry at his god he questions the things that are going on by forming ideas such as, “What are you my god? I thought angrily”(66). Ellie starts losing faith in his religion at this point and that shapes him into a completely different person because his life, choices, and identity had all been formed by religion. Ellie had the opportunity to prove his faith or deny it with the temptation of food and when he was making a decision describes, “As I swallowed my ration of soup I turned that unto a symbol of rebellion”( 69) At this point he knew he was only harming himself more because he chooses to eat the soup over having faith in his religion. He prioritizes his inner needs over the reason why he was in the camp in the first place. This shaped him into a selfish person because when the human mind gets put in difficult situations the mind will normally demonstrate selfish acts to help oneself over the bigger picture . This selfish act ultimately led to him not feeling like he had anyone there for him which made him lose his self-worth. Finally, in the last part of the book Ellie decides to look into a mirror to see what he looks like and he is very shocked, “ had not seen me since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me, the look in his eyes as they stared into mine has never left me.”(115) Ellie had finally made it out of the Holocaust at this