Theme Of Faith And Religion In Night By Elie Wiesel

Through Wiesel’s fiction and other writings, “he has attempted to reconcile the evil of Nazi Germany and the apparent indifference of God, thereby reaffirming his life and faith” (Morowski 449-450). Throughout the novel Night, there were many themes that highly contributed to the story. However, there was only one theme that stuck out to me the most; the changes of Wiesel’s faith and religion and how they developed over time. One of the most important of these themes is faith, and specifically, “Eliezer's struggle to retain his faith in God, in himself, in humanity, and in words themselves, in spite of the disbelief, degradation and destruction of the concentration camp universe” (Dougherty). A few examples of how the theme of faith and religion

“I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had forbidden me to do so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him” (Wiesel 69). Wiesel began to believe that his own faith was holding him back. Like prayer, words themselves often become twisted and “Eliezer loses faith in their ability to achieve communion with God, to communicate with others, or to bind people together in community. His last loss of faith is his loss of faith in words themselves, which causes him to withdraw into silence and disrupts the narrative itself.” To him, his religion was slowly becoming nothing more than a hindrance to his continuing survival. He started to believe that the only way he could continue to live was to forfeit his faith. “Eliezer's faith in himself, in God and in humanity has been consumed, and the horror of this annihilation in the concentration camps, It is shared faith in God which binds the Jews of Sighet together, and it is faith in each other which makes those relationships viable and strong”