Loss Of Faith In Night By Elie Wiesel

Each day, people all across the globe pray to the God they believe in and they rely on Him to ensure the safety and of themselves, their loved ones and others they know. But when their prayers fail, people start to wonder if they were even considered by God Himself. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie encounters these questions first hand while experiencing being a prisoner during the Holocaust. As he is sent through the processes of concentration camps, he experiences so many unwanted sights that one would automatically be astonished by.

Elie’s faith in God decreases through the course of the memoir while the horrors he witnesses increase, which allows him less will to survive.

In the beginning of the memoir, Elie shows his devout faith

The next step of his loss of faith starts again with a heartbreaking event. One night, Elie says that he and the other men at the Buna camp had to watch a young boy as he was hanged and “were forced to look at him at close range” (65). This agonizing event from the book upsets all of the witnesses as they watch the young boy dying in front of them “lingering between life and death” (65). From this, Elie admitted to himself “Where [God] is? This is where--hanging from this gallows…” (65). Here, Elie is telling himself that God has perished. He thinks that if God cannot watch out and prevent the death of an innocent child who was trying to protect someone, then there must not be a God at all. This illustrates his defiance against the God that he no longer accepted the silence of who was reluctant to protect a stainless child. Elie goes even further into explaining that “I, the former mystic, was thinking: Yes, man is stronger, greater than God” (67). Elie says that he has more faith in humanity than he has in God, who has treated him unfairly. This is a big step for Elie compared to how devoted he was in the beginning. As a result, he becomes desensitized. Evidence of this is shown when his father dies, and Elie says “I might have found something like: Free at last!” (112). Even when the last sliver of hope left that he was certain was alive dies, the reader realizes that he has gone crazy because he lost faith in God, causing him to lose hope in