The decline in faith of Elie Wiesel
The novel “Night” is a very moving story by Elie Wiesel about his experiences as a Jew teenager in the Holocaust. There are many topics in the book but one of the most powerful themes in my opinion in the book is Elie's decline in faith. At the beginning of the book, Elie is a deeply religious boy who studies the Torah and is devoted to God. However, as he lives through the holocaust he begins to question god's existence. So this essay will show how Elie's faith declined throughout the book. To see how Elie loses his faith throughout the novel will be when he witnesses the hanging of a young boy, when he witnesses babies being thrown into the fire, and will be the death of his father.
The hanging of a young boy. The boy is accused of sabotaging the Nazis and is sentenced to death. As he dies, the boy cries out for his father, who is also in the camp. Elie is deeply affected
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He says, "I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!"(Weisel, E. 1956). As he says free at last it really shows how different Elie is and how careless this horrible incident is. In the beginning of the book Elie and his father were very close and ELie would have probably been balling his eyes out upset. I didn't take this part of the novel as him not caring about his dad because i do believe he loved his father, I took it as he not only has no more feelings for almost anything his shows how his faith has been consumed as he says and he no longer believes in the traditional religious ideas of an afterlife or divine justice, it’s just over and it doesn't really phase him like it would have in the