Night Symbolism In Night By Elie Wiesel

“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

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

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