Elie Wiesel Use Of Dramatic Irony In Night

Alexa Harrison

LaPoe

English II Honors

20 April 2023

Night Style Analysis Six million Jews were killed in concentration camps established across Europe by the Nazi Regime (National WWII Museum). Only about 250,000 to 300,000 of the Jews imprisoned were able to survive the daily beatings, the lack of food, and the whims of the weather (Wikipedia). Elie Wiesel was one of those survivors. About ten years after being liberated from Buchenwald, Wiesel was able to gather the courage to let 115 pages of ink and paper tell the story of what he will never forget. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, he carefully and powerfully lays out the story of a sixteen year old boy forced to stare death straight in the face. He reflects on the horrors he encountered, the

In writing, there are multiple types of irony. One type is verbal irony, when the character says something, but means the opposite. This is commonly recognized as sarcasm. Second, there is situational irony, where the outcome is the opposite of what was expected to happen. Last, there is dramatic irony, where the audience is told or informed of something that the characters do not yet know. The most common type of irony found in Night is dramatic irony, as Wiesel uses flash forwards or shares future events to cause the current situation in the book to be more ironic. To begin, Wiesel uses dramatic irony early on in the memoir as his younger self asks Moishe the Beadle a question: “Once, I asked him the question: ‘Why do you want people to believe you so much?’ In your place I would not care whether they believed me or not” (7). Moishe the Beadle has just returned after being “expelled from Sighet” (6) for being a “foreign Jew” (6). He recounts what he endured to anyone who will listen to him, explaining that he and the other prisoners were “forced to dig huge trenches” (6) and then shot “one by one” (6). However, no one believed him because they didn’t understand how Moishe the Beadle would have “been able to escape” (6). At this moment, Wiesel cannot understand why Moishe cares so much about others believing and understanding him. However, the reader knows that in the future, Wiesel will answer his own question as he shares in the preface that “those who kept silent today will remain silent tomorrow” (xiii) and he doesn’t want “his past” (xv) to become “the future” (xv) for others. Another time in the memoir where the author uses irony to contribute to the theme is when Wiesel shares information he learned years later about a missed opportunity when a Hungarian police officer knocks on the Wiesel family’s window to warn them to flee: “Had he been able