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Literary analysis questions about night by elie wiesel
Literary devices in night by wiesel
Elie wiesel changes in night
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Many immediately think to blame the Nazis, and only the Nazis for the Holocaust. This is not the case however, as many groups all share a portion of the blame. In Elie Wiesel's book, Night, it is evident that blame be passed to Elie’s God, the Jewish people themselves, and the non Jewish Europeans. Elie writes how his non Jewish neighbors watched, the Hungarian police force the Jews to march. When this was happening, the Jews were insulted, and beaten; it was clear the police had dark intentions.
In the beginning, Eliezer is a very strong follower of the Jewish Religion. In the early part of the book, before they are sent to the labor camps, Wiesel shows that he is strong with his faith when he says: “I was almost thirteen and deeply observant. By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the temple (Wiesel 3).” This quote comes from the first page of the book, where Wiesel is talking about his life before the chaos started, circa. 1941.
What is symbolism? It is the use of symbols to represent ideas or qualities. What I will be talking about in this essay is how symbolism was used in the book “Night” by Eliezer Wiesel. While there are many different versions of symbolism in the story I will only be focusing on three that I think are the best to talk about. Those three include the yellow stars the Jews had to wear, the spoon and knife Eliezer got from his father, and the title of the book.
The motif that I chose from the book Night, by Elie Wiesel is “night”. This motif represents both physical and spiritual death, but it also represents death and despair. When Elie uses this word, it symbolizes when something in his life simply goes away, or when he enters a phase of darkness. For example, when Elie states, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed”, he is saying that the night that he entered the concentration camp, it of course changed his life forever, but it also was the night that he stopped trusting in God so much because he didn’t understand how God could be doing such horrible things to such innocent people. Now
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.
"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night"(Wiesel 34). Through Elie Wiesel’s witness of a genocide of his own people, the horrors that became his reality for a period of time was a never ending series of darkness. In his memoir Night, Wiesel uses night to symbolize a period of suffering and despair during his experience through the Holocaust. Night also symbolizes the darkness and hole left in Wiesel after this disaster has occured. Many survivors of the Holocaust are still terrified to tell their stories based on the fact that what they experienced still remains shocking to express.
Eliezer’s words in the middle of p.34, starting with, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed,”(34) gave a new meaning to the word night. The story had gone more in depth on the horrors of the time, also it reinforces what I had said in my previous journal, that Night, the title, refers to the never ending darkness that surrounds Eliezer. In this part of the book Eliezer writes “Never shall I forget,”(34) followed by everything he had seen, every story he will remember, everything he has endured. The repetition of the “Never shall I forget,”(34) isolates every attribute he doesn’t want to forget, which almost honors it and then he moves on to the next.
In brief, this story is labeled “night”, the author is Elie Wiesel. The tone of this story is intimate, and affectionate, it characterizes the extraordinary painful and personal experience of a single victim. The setting first takes place in Sighet, Transylvania, and then Elie is transported to several concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Gleiwitz; he spends the time there in the years 1941-1945, during World War II. Eliezer struggled to maintain faith in a caring God; Silence; Inhumanity to other humans. The first symbolism is fire; Madame Schachter foreshadows death and horror “look, look at it, fire, a terrible fire, mercy, oh that fire”.
Elie Wiesel titled the book Night because metaphorically speaking, the reader can connect subjects such as light and hope with day. Meanwhile, the opposite, darkness, despise, and hopelessness can be symbolized with night. Throughout his experiences within the concentration camps, Wiesel felt despair and evil around him and the other prisoners. He lost his faith in his religion and almost died on several occasions because of all the misery surrounding him. “‘For God’s sake, where is God?’
“I want to know how you keep holding on and believe again or how you never stop believing to begin with.” These words by Jessica Watson perfectly accentuate the battle that Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, struggles with throughout the novel. In the village of Sighet, Romania, a young Wiesel is enthralled by Jewish mysticism and believes the existence of an omnipotent God. One day, however, the Jewish people of Sighet are forced to live in supervised ghettos, and later brought to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Wiesel suffers with the physical torture of forced labor and hunger, as well as the mental and emotional torture of losing his family.
The title Night is a symbol itself. Just thinking about the word “night” one thinks of darkness, particularly the darkness of the concentration camp. The title itself symbolizes the loss of hope, the loss of honor, and the loss of the human soul. In chapter three of the memoir, Elie Wiesel talks about his first night in Birkenau.
The Nazi's dehumanizes the Jews like animals by being psychologically deprived of their necessities. In the beginning of the story, the Hungarian police and later the SS soldiers force all the Jewish people into ghettos, Elie says: "There was no longer any distinction between rich and poor, notables and the others; we were all people condemned to the same fate" (Wiesel 21). The Hungarian police and the Nazi's take away the Jews individual rights as people and their safety as they are placed in a confined space they are seen as the same. Consequently, at the death camp, Auschwitz Elie was given a number along with other Jewish people to symbolically show them that they are inferior to the Germans: "I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other
The victims of the Holocaust, as told by Elie Wiesel in his novel, Night, suffered a loss of indentify and struggled to maintain their humanity. After the Jews got evacuated from their ghettos, the German put them into the cattle trains and moved them to the concentration camp. While in the train, the Jews are tormented by the unbearable conditions, where there was no air to breath, no room to sit, everyone was hungry and thirsty and they began to lose their sense of public decorum. Some flirted openly, while others pretended not to notice. After several days, they arrived at the Czechoslovakian border.
In the article it says that Eliezer describes himself as a person who believes profoundly/strongly. The quote that is told means that throughout all the things that have happened to Eliezer he has always believed strongly in things like for instance how he believed in god in the first chapter, he bileived that god would save them all and they would servive the Holocaust. To believe profoundly means to believe strongly and agree. On chapter 1, page 1, it says that “ Why did I pray? Strange question.
America’s Overlooked Economy The United States is known for training world class athletes. America comes out on top when our athletes compete on the national level. Likewise, this is the case when David Brooks defines our current economic standing. “Is Our Country as Good as Our Athletes?”
