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Suffering And Symbolism In Elie Wiesel's Night

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“I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it . . .” (Wiesel 33) These were the few words that were uttered by the bewildered Elie Wiesel when the inhuman intentions of the Nazis were made clear to all the Jews in the concentration camps: either work or be burnt. Despite the incident being real and happening right in front of Elie’s eyes, the cruel intentions of the Nazis were so extreme and inhuman that Elie had a hard time believing the magnitude of the situation; that everything going around him was just another nightmare.
Taking the quote above by Elie Wiesel as an example, Elie Wiesel’s Night shows that the mass scale genocide of a racial or religious group leads to their extreme suffering and dehumanization.
In the author’s perspective, the theme of extreme suffering and dehumanization is conveyed through the use of animal imagery, symbolism and also through the use of sensory descriptive writing.

In the book, ‘Night’, Animal imagery plays an important role in conveying the extreme suffering and dehumanization that was imposed on Elie and his fellow Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust. “‘There are eighty of you in the car,’ the German officer added. ‘If …show more content…

I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” (Wiesel 115). In the final lines of Elie Wiesel’s Night, the author reflects on the effects the holocaust has had on him. Elie Wiesel referred his body to a corpse because even though he is alive and survived the holocaust physically, he is essentially dead, his soul and innocence being killed off by the suffering and the dehumanization he long endured in these camps. The young boy of Sighet who loved to study the Kabbalah is now long gone, disappearing with his family into the

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