Elie Wiesel is the author of the memoir, Night, which is written about his teenage experience in concentration camps during the Holocaust. During this book, he speaks about how his innocence becomes lost and the painful memories he’s had to keep from this time. Throughout the book, Wiesel uses symbolism, imagery, and foreshadowing to portray the theme, just because you overcome darkness doesn’t mean you’ll feel the peace of light.
Wiesel uses symbolism to depict how dark the time he spent in the Holocaust was. An example of this was when he said, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed” (Wiesel 34). Wiesel uses the element of symbolism to make “night” represent the horrific events he had to go through. I liked the way he did this because it gave perspective to how time no longer had meaning yet nothing that happened could be forgotten. On page 105, Wiesel talks about his ill dad through
…show more content…
On page 11, Wiesel quotes a conversation with his father, “’The yellow star? So what? It’s not lethal.’ Poor father of what then did you die?” This was used to show how later in the story his father would die in the camps because he was Jewish. Although he knew his father was naive, he couldn’t prepare himself for what might come. An alternative way Wiesel used foreshadowing to develop the theme was when he said, “In the air, the smell of burning flesh” (Wiesel 28). He said this to let us know people were getting burned alive at the new camp they arrived at. This gave insight into his unfair future, but it couldn’t stop him from feeling fear and being unaware of what was going on around him. Wiesel’s writing showed that nothing could prepare him and everyone else for what they were actively living through, yet they weren’t able to do anything about