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Night Symbolism In Night By Elie Wiesel

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“The philosophers are wrong: it is not words that kill, it is silence.” Elie Wiesel. Can silence really kill 6 million people? In this text, Elie is put under the excruciating pain of one of history’s most impaired events, the Holocaust. Hitler decided he wanted to exterminate all the Jewish people and decided to put them in camps and attempt to murder all of them. Wiesel survives and this is his story so he can show the world what they lived through. In the historical text, Night, Elie Wiesel conveys the symbol of the night as an endless time period in which he is referring to the camp and ,this shifts over time and then reveals the theme night can consume your hope and strip your identity. When the time of day comes when the night is coming …show more content…

He starts to build on the idea around night getting longer and longer, while the bloodshed continues to grow through the camps and death. In the text “NIGHT. No one was praying for the night to pass quickly. The stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration that was consuming us. Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes.” (Wiesel, 21) This evidence proves my point because it is detailed in stating how the night is the fire that kills them all. Conflagration is the deathly fire that exterminates the people that Hitler has dehumanized into numbers that have been tattooed onto their skin. The unseeing eyes are mirroring the darkness that will travel through not just the surroundings of them but will eventually go through into their souls that creates emotional suffrage the camps endure onto the inmates. The symbolic nature of night does all come together as when darkness comes over the other imprisoned victims feel the evil come over and feel no hope and helplessness. They begin to give up hope and start to think that everything is unfavorable. Wiesel dismally says “We were given no food. We lived on snow; it took the place of bread. The days were like nights, and the …show more content…

Nights helps develop that by creating religious stand-points in the book. Night consumes your hope in this text by being the darkness that represents God's absence. “Confidence soared. Suddenly we felt free of the previous night’s terror. We gave thanks to God. (Wiesel, 27) Elie has a very religious perspective on the hell God is watching him live through. In this piece of evidence, he thanks God for leaving the terrors of the previous night. In the bible when the Lord came to Earth there was no light and just darkness. The first thing he created was light. When light is there Elie believes in God's presence but when darkness consumes the present and hell commences he concludes God's absence. So if darkness consumes your hope all night you will feel anguished by the darkness. The identity in the night is no longer important. You are generalized into being human and that's it. But being human is an outside chance when the antisemitic hate has already caused you to lose your identity. “My soul had been invaded and devoured by black flame. So many events had taken place in just a few hours that I had completely lost all notion of time. When had we left our homes? And the ghetto? And the train? Only a week ago? One night? One single night?” In this piece of evidence, he states about his soul being destroyed. What had happened to his soul I can infer meaning that

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People always say that bad things happen at night. I believe Elie Wiesel called his Holocaust memoir, Night because Wiesel uses foreshadowing and symbolization of bad things with the name Night. Throughout the book, we see how Wiesel mentions the physical and symbolic darkness of night, right before something terrible happens. For example, in chapter 7 pgs 98-103, when Night symbolization as it relates to the author’s experiences. This happens when the car stops in a field and SS soldiers shout at the people in the cars to throw out their dead.

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The central theme of Night by Elie Wiesel is the dehumanization and loss of faith in humanity during the Holocaust. The memoir illustrates the atrocities committed against Jews, including forced labor and executions in concentration camps. Eliezer and his father are subjected to severe physical torture, hunger, and disease throughout the course of the book while living under Nazi rule. As they struggled to survive, they witnessed unspeakable acts of violence against the other individuals in the camp which dehumanized and degraded them. Eliezer and other Night characters change as a result of these experiences, like losing faith in God and beginning to doubt the existence of humanity.

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In the novel, “Night” Elie Wiesel communicates with the readers his thoughts and experiences during the Holocaust. Wiesel describes his fight for survival and journey questioning god’s justice, wanting an answer to why he would allow all these deaths to occur. His first time subjected into the concentration camp he felt fear, and was warned about the chimneys where the bodies were burned and turned into ashes. Despite being warned by an inmate about Auschwitz he stayed optimistic telling himself a human can’t possibly be that cruel to another human.

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Night is a book reflected through the author’s emotions—visually, mentally, and physically. These emotions are condensed within the theme of Night, which was his loss of religious faith. The theme itself was reflected off the author’s experiences, hence the necessity of author’s craft. Elie Wiesel’s experiences of losing his father (physically and mentally) and watching innocent adults and children die (visually and physically) develops how the author is telling the story. In his loss of religious faith, he questioned God: “Why should I bless His name?

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(Wiesel 6)At the opening of night Elie's attitude towards religion he was deeply committed and faithful, but as time goes on through his experiences in the death camp made him grow angrier with God and Questioned if God was alive and how could he let the Jews suffer like this. (Wiesel 33) He says, " Why would he bless God? (Wiesel 67) At the age of fifteen he was a witness to brutal slaughtering of a group of people, dehumanization, family division and thrown in a fiery furnace. The author's attitude towards religion will forever be changed.

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Eliezer couldn’t understand why God would let such horrible things that he faced during the holocaust happen. Eliezer would sometimes question God’s existence because he was taught God was everywhere, so good was everywhere as well. Eliezer loses his faith in God, but still believes there is one at the end of the book. Sources and Methods Elie Wiesel didn’t use any sources in his book Night, it was written about his own experience during the holocaust.

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Elie Wiesel is the author of the memoir, Night, which is written about his teenage experience in concentration camps during the Holocaust. During this book, he speaks about how his innocence becomes lost and the painful memories he’s had to keep from this time. Throughout the book, Wiesel uses symbolism, imagery, and foreshadowing to portray the theme, just because you overcome darkness doesn’t mean you’ll feel the peace of light. Wiesel uses symbolism to depict how dark the time he spent in the Holocaust was. An example of this was when he said, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed” (Wiesel 34).

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Their experiences stripped the “day” out of them and all they see is night. They are still mentally at the camp because of their experiences. Wiesel uses night as a metaphor to show the struggle and darkness during the holocaust. “Night” is a universal symbol of everything as it represents trauma and

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In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, we see metaphors, imagery, and most important symbols. All of these signs help us understand what the book is about and the reasons behind writing this memoir. In reading this book we get a different point of view as to what the Holocaust was really about. There's a more serious meaning behind the metaphor “Night” which symbolizes just how dark this era actually was. It follows the life of a young Jew who survived, spoke out against the silence, and shared what life was like in the concentration camps.

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The night is a time when God is not looking upon his people – the time of the Devil. The symbol of the long night represents the abandonment of God from Elie. By turning Elie’s life into a single long night, the camps make him disregard his religion to focus on his survival, turning him from a human into an animal. The horrors of the camps change Elie’s

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Elie Wiesel titled the book Night because metaphorically speaking, the reader can connect subjects such as light and hope with day. Meanwhile, the opposite, darkness, despise, and hopelessness can be symbolized with night. Throughout his experiences within the concentration camps, Wiesel felt despair and evil around him and the other prisoners. He lost his faith in his religion and almost died on several occasions because of all the misery surrounding him. “‘For God’s sake, where is God?’

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1916 Words | 8 Pages

There is also representation of suffering in Night by the author describing the pain that they had to go through and experience during the holocaust. They have experienced many horrible things that don't just affect physical suffering but mental suffering as well. Mental suffering will have to involve the alteration of their minds, which we see when “ Right next to us the high chimney of crematory oven rose up. It no longer made any impression on us” (pg 99).  

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But then he experiences the hardships of the Holocaust and it abruptly changed him. In the book Night, the main theme is religious belief, shown when Elie talks about the his strong religion and belief as a boy, his disconnection from religion, and the inhumane actions the Nazis caused. Having a strong belief in something so important to who we are and then being confronted with horrors which cause us to cease to believe, is a significant life changing event. During this time, many people questioned where God truly was. Even Elie was questioning where God was.

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Throughout this semester, I have had many struggle when it came down to doing an assignment for ENC1102. When it comes down to my growth, I have noticed throughout my papers that various struggle I had in the past, are now not as difficult for me. One of the main examples of this is being able to clearly state my thesis. The thesis statement has always been an issue for me because I never really knew how to get my point across clearly through a thesis statement. When doing the proposal, I had to figure out how to properly state my thesis and have it linked into the rest of the paper.

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This can be seen in the novel as it took one night for Elie Wiesel’s faith to be consumed. In addition, the nighttime is a symbol referring to something sinister which aids the reader’s understanding of the theme. An example of this can be viewed on page 65 which states “For God’s sake, where is God?” And from within me, I heard a voice answer: “Where He is? This is where-hanging here from this gallows…”

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