Role Of Minor Characters In Night By Elie Wiesel

In any story, characters are the driving force behind the plot development. They are the people, anthropomorphized objects, and/or animals, that perform the actions and the dialogue in the story. Minor characters are characters that are relevant to the story only for a small portion of the story. These characters can have little to no impact on the story or, like in “Night” they could have a huge impact on the story. Every great story has minor characters. An example of an important, minor character would be Antman in “Avengers Endgame.” He only appears for a few minutes in the movie but his part is what led the Avengers to discover time travel using his discoveries. Night, a biographical nonfiction novel, by Elie Wiesel is a story about Elie

He is an old religious man in Sighet. In the time he and Elie spend together, they talk endlessly about religion, and life, and find what's truly important. Elie’s real father was disconnected from his family and religion, and Elie had no one to speak to. Moishe “spoke to [him] for hours on end about the kabbalah’s revelations”(Weisil 5). Moishe was eventually taken, and when he returned he was believed to have gone mad. Another minor character the author introduces the reader to is a woman named Mrs. Schatcher. She plays an even smaller role, spanning only four pages of chapter two. Mrs. Schatcher is a mother in Sighet. She spends time with Elie while being transported by the german soldiers. She’s gone mad, she screams the words “I see fire”(Weisel 25)! No one believed her, but when the train came to a stop she was the only one who was sane when they saw the flames, the smoke, and the ash that came from the incendiary. Moishe and Mrs. Schatcher not only help drive the story forward through their words of caution but represent the effects of the Holocaust. These characters prove the author's claim,” It was as though madness had infected all of us”(Weisel