Examples Of Syntax In Night By Elie Wiesel

The Holocaust is one of the if not the most cruel punishment for a single race in recorded human history. No one can truly understand the hardships that a man or woman had to go through to survive it. Society is continuously pretending to understand the pain that people similar to Eliezer had to go through. It is impossible to understand the horror of the Holocaust but in the novel Night by Elie Wiesel through the change of language it makes it a bit more realistic the effect the Holocaust has on a person. The form of medium Elie Wiesel uses helps the reader understand through a bias the day to day Eliezer had to suffer through. The emotions that readers read help them connect to the protagonist in a deeper sense. The syntax used by the changed

Wiesel in the beginning was a boy that did not care for much besides his family and his religion. He was an extremely religious boy that worshipped god and spent day and night reading his Torah. Although the daily torment of the Nazi can truly show the effect it had on Eliezer. As upon just arriving to hell of sorts he states “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night”( Elie Wiesel, Night 45) This quote was when Eliezer had first entered the Concentration Camp. Note the sentence structure he uses, the word choice he uses. As poetic it is, it is still of human. It is of a man that has life worth living. He values himself and feels he is significant enough to explain his situation. He is using full sentences. Although as noted throughout the story Eliezer had to mature and at one point he became “nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach” (Wiesel 50). This quote helps show the loss of value he had of even himself. The horror of the Holocaust has broken this boy into losing every want but to just simply breathe. He was no longer living a life but was just a shell of himself now breathing. He is explaining to the reader the significance that the lack of food truly is. Food which is a basic need for every human being became a scarcity. This scarcity helps him devalue himself and feel he is ceasing to exist and with this starts using irregular sentence structures as seen in the quote “I was nothing but ash now” (Wiesel 54). Notice in this sentence the simplicity of all the words except the word nothing. He is adding emphasis on the word nothing because he himself believes that he has deterred into nothing. This helps readers understand how little life he has left and he is not in fact truly living but just surviving. At times he does not even want to be doing the simple task of breathing but just quit.