In his memoir, Night, author Elie Wiesel describes with vivid details the horrors he and other inmates endured while prisoners in concentration camps during the Holocaust. One major theme of the work at large, and particularly of the middle section of the memoir, is loss of faith. In the beginning of the memoir, Elie presents himself as a precocious child, deeply interested in the complex mystical aspects of Judaism. However, after enduring time in Auschwitz and Buna concentration camps, he can no longer accept the notion of an omnipotent and forgiving god. He describes his thoughts hearing his fellow prisoners pray on Rosh Hashanah, one of the most holy days of the Jewish year, saying, “Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. …show more content…
I found this to be somewhat surprising—I expected that Elie would maintain the same degree of faith that Mrs. Mantelmacher described, that it would be his salvation, the one thing he could cling to in a world so full of evil. However, Elie has taken the opposite approach, resenting the god to whom he had once prayed and even going so far as to question his existence altogether. My epiphany occurred while comparing the two passages. Both Elie and the unnamed man have grown to distrust god’s goodness. However, while Elie has become angry at the god in which he still believes, the other patient seems to have abandoned all hope of divine intervention, instead trusting only human nature. I realized that his statement about believing Hitler was intended to be ironic, since he certainly does not truly trust Hitler in any way, but it also carries truth. I saw this man as a variation on the archetypal sage, offering wisdom to a younger person in a time of strife. Were I in Elie’s situation, I think I would have found the man’s advice almost comforting. In such an unpredictable world, it could be reassuring to remember that one can rely on the evils of man. These events leave no doubt to Elie’s mental evolution. He has already endured such suffering that reliance upon the consistent nature of evil has become his only