Morality In Elie Wiesel's Night

According to Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale University, “...our judgements of good and evil are influenced by emotional reactions such as empathy and disgust.” In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, Eliezer goes through an emotional journey that almost changes his personality completely. He does not just change out of the blue, but he changes because he needed to survive his new “home.” Some people may say that their morals and personality will never change, but Wiesel explains the dehumanizing effects that truly resonated with him to prove that his personality and morals were changed from the start of his experience to the end based on these events. To begin with Eliezer shows in the first part of the memoir that personality and morals are not that easy to alter, with just simply taking away valuables and personal belongings. To enforce this thought, Wiesel says: “The barbed wire that encircled us like a wall did not fill us with real fear. In fact, we felt this was not a bad thing; we were entirely among ourselves” (Wiesel 11). Eliezer is telling us that they rather enjoyed the ghettos and looked to the brighter side of things. There were only Jews in the ghetto, and that’s just how they liked it. This is significant because they are able to stay happy and

With this is mind we have to face the fact that people who are treated less than human will be emotionally scared until they eventually become a different person. Unfortunately dehumanization is going on right now and people like Eliezer are being treated as animals, which thus makes them think they really are animals. We know now how serious dehumanization can have an affect on people, so we all have to try and put a stop to it. It is clear now that our judgements are in fact, influenced by emotional reactions just like how Paul Bloom claimed it