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 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.
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.
In the short novel, Night by Elie Wiesel, the author discusses an event of tremendous scarring effect to him and all those unfortunate to be caught in it’s scourge, The Holocaust. From the new age diaspora, death marches, cremation, and many other tyrannical actions from the German Reich that left all witnesses traumatized. These horrendous acts brought out a primal version of self preservation in the prisoners. The prisoners self preservation is displayed through their fight for rations of bread, their relentless labor to avoid the path to death that is tested by Dr. Mengele, leading the prisoners ultimately to the crematorium.
Night by Elie Wiesel is an adaptation of Elie Wiesel’s experiences in the Holocaust. The story is a portrayal of the suffering hundreds of thousands of people faced during the Holocaust. While the novel itself portrays Elie’s experiences, it is depicted from the viewpoint of Eliezer, a young boy who adapts to his new life during the Holocaust. Eliezer’s battle with God is a very prominent theme which can be seen throughout this novel. In the onset of the novel Eliezer’s belief in God is infinite.
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.
The significant symbol is the corpse that looked back at Elie. This tells the reader that has the Jews die they were all over camp and his presence a physical sense to show that the author did lose some life in his eyes. The corpse-like look is symbolic of the irreparable damage done unto him. Many of the Jews were spiritual towards the existence of the concentration camp because the deaths allowed everyone to know the story told upon someone who isn’t alive today to speak for themselves. People don’t realize the stories that people will never know of without those to tell the stories of the corpse.
However Elie was lucky enough to be paired with his father for the majority of his time in the Holocaust. There are many occasions where Elie had said that if his father wasn’t there, he would’ve just ended it all. In one scene described by Elie, him and others running during an evacuation to a nearby camp, he could’ve easily fallen out of line and been shot quickly, only there was one thing stopping him, “My father’s presence was the only thing that stopped me,” (Wiesel 86). His father provided the only bit of comfort throughout his time, and in a place such as Auschwitz comfort was an extremely scarce commodity. Without his father, Elie would’ve fallen victim to the horrendous torture and would’ve most likely died, whether that be by the hands of another or by his own.
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.
Death is the inevitable. Every little aspect of life comes in contact with death at least once in this cruel unbreakable cycle. Few are taken by death as early as before the exit the womb. Before they are ever able to live a life that will eventually come to a bittersweet end. Others are lucky enough to live past their due.
