How Does Elie Wiesel Use Metaphors In Night

Night by Elie Wiesel brings back the traumatic events of Holocaust. The true story Night begins with a twelve year old boy named Elie who lives in the small village of Sighet, Romania with his father and mother. His instructor returns from a near death experience and warns them of Nazi aggressors that will soon threaten the peacefulness of their lives. Elie and his father remain calm until they are shipped (with many other Jews) in the spring on a convoy headed for Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, a concentration camp. Elie uses metaphors of “night” to convey darkness, death, and loss of faith used as a symbol for enduring the horrible conditions and traumatic events. First the word “night” is often used to describe darkness, and it

Often when people think of death they envision darkness which is portrayed in the night. Wiesel uses night as metaphor for death in that he uses the darknesses that surround the night sky. All around he would only see his fellow Jews being murdered and forced to live in horrible conditions which are dark. Elie had to witness a fellow Polish named Juliek play with his heart even with no hope left,” I don't know how long he played. I was overcome by sleep. When I awoke at daybreak, I saw Juliek facing me, hunched over, dead. Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant lit-tle corpse.”(Wiesel, 95) Juliek played the song of death with little hope left for him and his violin. Although Elie witnessed many deaths already, the death of a child was his breaking point, “"Caps off!" screamed the Lagerälteste. His voice quivered. As for the rest of us, we were weeping. "Cover your heads!" Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing...And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering betweenlife and death, writhing before our eyes.”(Wiesel, 64) The child could do nothing but slowly feel the rope cutting his circulation. With the little amount of food Elie already gets he would try to ration the food but after witnessing the death of that child, “That night the

Before Elie was shipped to the concentration camp he would spend his time studying Jewish mysticism, “One evening, I told him how unhappy I was not to be able to find in Sighet a master to teach me the Zohar, the Kabbalistic works, the secrets of Jewish mysticism.”(Wiesel, 5) he once had a love for his race before war changed his mind. Elie believed that if God answered him everything would be ok but when he did not, “Never shall i forget those flames that consumed my faith forever…..Never shall i forget those moments that murdered God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes….Never.” He even prayed to God even when he did not believe he was there. God had not helped Elie even after he would sing his praises, “We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we were capable of singing His praises.” Elie was tired of God’s silence, he did not show him mercy with all that he endured. The destruction, the death, the conditions ruined his faith and any hope he had