Symbolism in Night
Symbolism is the use of symbols to represent ideas or qualities. In the book Night by Eliezer Wiesel, the narrator’s father doesn’t see a problem with wearing the yellow star on his coat because he says that “no one has died from it”, but he doesn’t know or understand that it’s a symbol for something with a hidden meaning. The yellow star made the Jews easy to identify when deporting them to the camps. A different and deeper interpretation is that the yellow star represents isolation and was intended to humiliate the Jews and mark them out for humiliation and discrimination. There are many examples of symbolism in Night. In this paper we will analyze what the use of the title of the book, the spoon and knife Elie’s father gave him, and fire represent.
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It appears throughout Night as a symbol of the Nazi’s inhuman and sadistic power. Madame Schachter, on the way to Auschwitz-Birkenau, has a vision of fire and it turns out to be a premonition of what’s yet to come. When Eliezer and his father arrive at the camp, they’re forced to watch the Nazis burn babies and young children in a ditch. Most obviously and importantly, fire is a catalyst in the death of millions of Jews in the crematorium, including his father, mother, and youngest sister. In the Bible, fire represents God and divine wrath. But in Night, fire is in the hands of the enemy, and they use it to punish the innocent. This reversal shows how the Holocaust changed Eliezer’s entire concept of the universe and his own