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Night Symbolism In Night By Elie Wiesel

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Eliezer Wiesel was a fifteen-year-old boy deported to the Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944-1945 along with the Jews from his hometown in Sighet. He demonstrates the personal struggles to maintain faith along with the struggle of silence, all of which are presented through the theme of Night by Elie Wiesel. His character develops a loss of innocence as he encounters inhumanity and the death of his father.

Elie was a believer in God and learned the secrets of Jewish mysticism with the help of Moishe the Beadle before being sent out to the concentration camps. As he maintained his survival, he lost his faith in God. He didn’t participate in the prayers and felt like an observer as he watched the men who gathered for prayer. "In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger."(68) As Elie and the Jews went through their days of working, starvation, and dehydration, they felt as if their days were night "and the nights left in our souls the dregs of their darkness." (100) The symbolism of night demonstrates the beginning of Earth …show more content…

"On the Appelplatz, surrounded by electrified barbed wire, thousands of Jews, anguish on their faces, gathered in silence." (66) The barbed wire helps reflect that Elie and other prisoners were living in the worst conditions and in silence, in similarity to Mrs. Schachter. On their way to the concentration camp, Mrs. Schachter spotted a fire, which no one believed until the train stopped. "And as the train stopped, this time we saw flames rising from a tall chimney into a black sky. Mrs. Schachter had fallen silent on her own." (28) Fire and flames represent the symbolism of the burning bush of Moses and God. The bush represents the burning heart of love and purity for the Jews, but in this case, it was used to destroy the innocent

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For my creative response to Night by Elie Wiesel, I decided to make an alternative book cover. The theme that I chose to portray in my adaptation of the cover is the journey from darkness to light. My cover is black at the top and the amount of black reduces towards the bottom of the cover. I did this to show the transition from darkness to light that is shown during this novel.

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Elie Wiesel has a somber mood in the text ‘Night’. He does this by using imagery and symbolism, Wiesel does this so curiously, as not to plunge into a sad mood, but slowly eases the reader into the despair. The author describes a boy as “angel faced” that slowly moves towards a tragic ending. The angel is a power symbol throughout all cultures, and using that symbol to be placed onto a boy, and expressed through imagery creates a sense of dread and despair. Eliezer depicts a young boy to a “sad faced angel”, in the sense that the boy seems holy, and innocent, yet being in a labor camp, reinforces our idea that the Nazis have no respect for anything good or sacred in the world.

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Elie’s father was taken away, at Night, to the crematorium. Sentenced to his Death. That is only one example of a disastrous event that happened at night. Another event was that they arrived at the their first camp by night. This event was the event that had led up to all of the hardships that were to come and his father’s death.

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Prisoners in Auschwitz received about three “meals” a day. Half a liter of “coffee” for breakfast, and a liter of soup for the noon meal. For dinner, the prisoners usually received about 10 ounces of black bread, with 25 grams of sausage or margarine, or a tablespoon of marmalade of cheese. The small amount of food prisoners got in concentration camps caused them to starve. In the story, Night, the absence of food caused Eliezer and others around him to slowly change themselves and their morales, hoping for a little extra soup or a crust of bread.

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Look at this fire! This terrible fire! Have mercy on me!", but nothing was there “only the darkness of night” (25). During the day she remained absent but towards the evening again she began to shout again: "The fire, over there!"(26). In the beginning people had just thought of her to be mad in a concerning way but eventually after all her hollering they got tired of it and begun to struck her.

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In Elie Wisel’s memoir, Night, the events experienced by the protagonist and his responses to these events help to shape his identity by changing his beliefs and how he views the world. Throughout the story, Night, by Elie Wisel, he encounters conflicts that affect his religion. Questioning his faith, Elie says,“As for me, I had ceased to pray. . . . I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice” (Wiesel 45).

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Symbolism can be seen through both good and bad alike. Though when it comes to instances that have to do with the holocaust, it’s almost always, if not always, a painful connotation. The holocaust is one of if not the the largest instance of mass genocide in recorded history. Leaving each Jew that survived with a different story to tell. While their story’s remained different, the pain that they each experienced was not.

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Eliezer’s words in the middle of p.34, starting with, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed,”(34) gave a new meaning to the word night. The story had gone more in depth on the horrors of the time, also it reinforces what I had said in my previous journal, that Night, the title, refers to the never ending darkness that surrounds Eliezer. In this part of the book Eliezer writes “Never shall I forget,”(34) followed by everything he had seen, every story he will remember, everything he has endured. The repetition of the “Never shall I forget,”(34) isolates every attribute he doesn’t want to forget, which almost honors it and then he moves on to the next.

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As a 16 year old, I would say that I go through a lot in my day-to-day life. Waking up early everyday for school, staying in school for 7 hours, studying, and eating meals that I would argue are sometimes not the very best. If I had to imagine my 16 year old self getting stripped away from my home, being separated from my family, and to live in absolutely unlivable conditions, I wouldn’t be writing this essay right now. These conditions, however, are the exact conditions that the then-teenager Elie Wiesel and many countless others have gone through during the Holocaust. Wiesel accounts his personal experience through writing a memoir, Night, in it his experiences written with much symbolism.

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For me, the greatest moment of sadness in the memoir is when Elie’s father dies. His death is gruesome and much suffering is shown throughout the last pages of the memoir. A dramatic shift is made in Elie’s perspective after this traumatic event. His father serves as his sole motivation to continue on in their cruel conditions and without him Elie is hopeless and alone. I feel Elie's father's death also symbolizes the unjustness of their situation.

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