Night By Elie Wiesel Father Analysis

For most of the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie was determined to remain with his father, after being separated from his mother and sisters during the early years of the Holocaust. Elie’s father, his only remaining relative, was all he had left. Determination to keep them together very well may have been what kept him alive. Eventually, his father’s willpower deteriorated along with his health, making him more of a burden than a tether by the end of the book. Although he still loved his father, Elie no longer needed him. That being said, this example reflects the idea of death and release, a reoccuring theme present in the conclusion of Night.
In the final chapters, prisoners from Buna who had been so close to freedom could wait no longer, and death was a sort of release from their pain. In this way, those who died were free. That freedom was so

Dementia and physical illness rendered him too weak to rely on, so rather than asking how Elie would live without his father, a new question was presented: How would his father live without Elie? Immediately after arriving to a liberation camp, the surviving prisoners were divided into various groups, prompting Elie to squeeze his father’s hand as if his life depended on it. Unfortunately, exposure to such unforgiving environments had introduced Elie’s father to the kind of seductive release mentioned previously. This was conveyed through an argument between the two where Elie refused to let his father sleep. Elie had known that if the latter slept, he would never wake up. However, Elie’s father was obstinate, begging to rest because he was so unbearably weak. The one-sided quarrel caused Elie to admit, “I knew that I was no longer arguing with him but with Death itself, with Death that he had already chosen” (105). Elie had previously demonstrated the strength to fight for his life, but his father didn’t possess that same strength. He sought release from his