Denial In Night

867 Words4 Pages

Psychologist Robert Plutchick suggests that there are over ninety different emotions that humans feel, and half of them are positive. Night, written by Elie Wiesel, recalls the struggles that Elie experiences through his astronomical success in surviving the Holocaust. Befriending multiple other victims, Wiesel realizes that his inner conflicts with the loss of his humanity are mutual amongst everyone. The emotional and physical strain that was bestowed on the Jews sapped them of their life and converted them into lifeless being whose exclusive purpose was to survive, even though many did not wish to. Throughout the novel, the Jews’ emotions progressed from a state of denial during much of the beginning, in which accepting their obvious fate was not an option, to thorough apathy towards their melancholic, dismal lives. Beginning at the origin of the novel, the Jewish population of Sighet recognized the threat of the Nazi occupation, yet they refused to believe that the Nazis would ever advance deep into Hungary. One such instance develops after Moishe the Beadle, a local pauper who survived a mass execution, returns and begs the Jews to listen to his story. However, his audience “insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was …show more content…

Throughout Night, Wiesel depicts a situation in which the Jews were stripped of all emotion, as it transformed into an excess burden that was too strenuous to retain. Despite the fact that the victims of the Holocaust once lived joyous, genuine lives, they were leached of anything worth living for until they became hollowed shells whose only emotion was the lack of any emotion. In the end, the denial of their doom led to their dense apathy which coexisted with a plethora of fragments, which once formed their humanity, that were