Faith Fading with Hope People look to God as the pinnacle of motivation, where people “find rest in God alone, [their] hope comes from him” (Scriptures). When severe calamity and hardships are presented to humans, their faith that their God will protect them weakens. When Eliezer Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust and author of the memoir Night, faces the Nazis’ dehumanizing acts that strip him of his faith, the development of how a once “former mystic” turns into a hopeless corpse is presented to the audience (Wiesel 67). Throughout this account, Wiesel implements rhetorical questions as a way to emphasize the theme that when people lose faith, they are not only losing their God, but they are losing their hope for survival. Before Eliezer’s harsh journey destroys the balance that allows his religion …show more content…
As a young Jewish boy he is devoted to his faith in the beginning, and the degree in which he studies religion is considerably more than many other boys. When questioned by a friend, “Why do you pray?” he thinks to himself “Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” (Wiesel 4). These rhetorical questions that reflect Eliezer’s inner thoughts establish how his beliefs and experiences up to this point in …show more content…
Eliezer grew up with a passion to learn his religion, and the reason this continued up until the Holocaust is because his experiences and beliefs did not contradict themselves. Once he endures much torture his faith is stripped from him, and his hope for survival decreases. Finally, the memoir advances to where Eliezer no longer believes there is a merciful God out there. This development Wiesel writes about allows the audience to understand that when someone lacks to find rest in God, hope will be hard to find as