The novel Night was written by Elie Wiesel; he gave details of his childhood and life before, throughout, and after he and his family were sent into the German Death Camps. His novel is based off of his experiences as a child in the multiple camps he went through and endured, his purpose for writing is not to gain sympathy, but to create awareness and inform further generations of the horrific cruelties that happened on the European Continent. He does not want the events of the continents past to be forgotten, but in saying this he also does not want anything similar to ever happen. Within the novel multiple themes, symbols, and motifs will be repeated: but within all three of those inhumane cruelty can be found. Cruelty is the key part to this novel, without the …show more content…
Two themes that will be focused on throughout this essay are confinement and loss of identity, the cruelty shown throughout the book is enough to break someone, but with the addition of confinement and losing oneself, it breaks one deeper, it destroys and devastates whatever is left that has not already been broken. Confinement and the loss of oneself worked hand in hand to break someone mentally and physically, the officers treated everyone like they were slaves. No one was given freedom, everyone was given the bare minimum, and that included the things needed to survive: they were given a slice of bread and a bowl of soup broth. The fact that these meals were so low in nutrition was hard for the prisoners to conform to; but then on top of the malnourishment they were also performing different types of hard labor throughout the day, depending on what their job was. Even though they weren’t being fed enough the prisoners were given little to no shower time, so no-one was hygienic in the concentration and death camps, there just wasn’t time for it, because the only time they had extra was for the regular selections