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Essays on symbolism in literature
Use of Symbolism
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In the tantalizing novel, Night by Elie Wiesel, the author uses figurative to convey his thoughts and emotions. There are two cauldrons of soup left laying in the middle of the road with no one guarding them and the starving jews are looking at them. The author uses the metaphor, “ Two lambs with hundreds of wolves lying in wait for them.” ( Wiesel 59), to vividly describe this moment in time in the book. This is an accurate comparison of the two cauldrons of soup to two helpless sheep and the Jews to hungry wolves.
Do you remember learning about the holocaust? The holocaust was a historical event and lasted twelve years. It was a horrible time in the world. Elie Wiesel in the memoir “Night” explains why the holocaust should never happen again. Wiesel uses pathos, Metaphors, and lastly repetition to support his explanation.
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.
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.
Imagine yourself being beaten, starved, and worked to the core by german ss guards. In Elie Wiesel's memoir, Night the reader exposed to the life that a 14 year old jew had to go through when separated and put to work in a concentration camp. The text is full of Similes, Metaphors, Allusions, especially symbolism. The author uses the Cattle cars, The Star of David, and a Violin as the symbols in the book.
In 1943, during World War II, there was a mass genocide of the Jewish population. Many people in the concentration camps had lost everything from clothes to family to names. These people who after losing everything, gave up, lost their lives. But those who continued putting one foot in front of the other, made it through to the end. Elie Wiesel, a young boy at the time, has lived to tell the world about his experiences in Auschwitz.
In Night by Elie Wiesel, he writes how dark the world can be. Night is about a 15 year old boy and his terrifying experience in the holocaust .Night symbolizes the darkness that the Jewish people constantly felt, a time when they were suffering, and had little to no hope. Wiesel demonstrates this with the woman screaming on the way to the camp, when Elie’s innocence and childhood was taking away on the first day of camp, and Elie’s experience on the train going to Buchenwald. On the first day going to camp,there was a woman who was screaming about a fire,but none of the prisoners saw it. “As soon as night fell, she began to scream ‘There’s a fire over there!’She would point in space, always the same(p.24).In this part of the book, Night
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.
It’s often complicated to metaphorically express a depressing topic with only one word that people can relate to. Author Elie Wiesel had managed to complete this feat, though many may argue what exactly Wiesel meant to express. The word “night” symbolizes fear, hopelessness, and futility. This gives reason to why the word and its extended metaphor are appropriate for the title. To put a start to the claim, the word night symbolizes fear because, at many points of the biography it tells of the situations where Wiesel and his family experienced the horrible emotion.
The symbol I chose was God for Eli because he does talk about God quite often during his days in the holocaust from the book Night. This picture I choose is a pile of dead bodies to represent death for the symbol God. The reason I choose this picture because Eli had witnessed a lot of cruel things at a young age. He had worshipped God so much and had trust and love for him.
It was in Auschwitz during 1944, at the time of arrival about midnight when the smell of burning flesh saturated the air. There was an unimaginable nightmare of a truck unloading small children and babies thrown into the flames. This is only one event in its entirety of endless events to be remembered in order to understand how deeply literal and symbolic the book entitled Night by Elie Wiesel is. The novel brings light to the reader about what the Jews faced while in fire, hell and night; nonetheless, the author portrays each and every day during this year as a night in hell of conflagration. "Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes."
In the time between 1933 and 1945, 6 million Jews had their lives ripped away from them thanks to the Nazi party and the concentration camps run by the government. Holocaust is the word chosen to describe the murder of millions of people. The man most people consider the cause of this was the furrier of Germany, Adolf Hitler. The experience was so terrible that no words seemed to accurately describe it. Multiple people who have survived this even have tried to express their story.
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.
After going through the holocaust many victims said that they suffered from PTSD, depression, and sleep disorders other had health problems due to the poor conditions of the camp. Night by Elie Wiesel is about the authors expirence of the holocaust as a teenage boy and how it slowly starts to break his pyche. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, the author uses conflict, characterization, symbolism to enhance the theme that putting people in tortuous situations causes mentality and body to break. The conflict of misery Elie and others had to go through because of the Holocaust.
My mom and I are famous in our household for choosing a tv show and sitting on the living room couch to watch every episode, often over a period of months. We have seen Gilmore Girls, Scandal, New Girl, and Stranger Things. During my junior year of high school, we decided to start "that new show on Amazon Prime about those women reporters. " It was called Good Girls Revolt. Good Girls Revolt is the true story of the 1970 lawsuit involving gender discrimination at Newsweek.