Literary Analysis Of Elie Wiesel's 'Night'

Night Literary Analysis Essay What is it like to be surrounded by death, and be unmoved by the thousand of bodies, lying lifeless around you? A german named Adolf Hitler had enslaved all of the Jewish people and developed a plan to exterminate all people of Jewish descent. He placed them in camps and managed to kill six million Jews, two-thirds of the Jewish population using an army of german soldiers. In the memoir “Night”, by Elie Wiesel, the author, along with his father, had lived in one of the camps as an internee, who ten years later, wrote a book on his experiences during this time in history. This book demonstrated the changes that Elie had been through. Elie’s changes are seen through his writings in the book and through his attitude …show more content…
To begin with, when Elie was sitting, praying, Moishe, a friend of the the community, smiles and asked, “Why do you cry when you pray?’, he asked as though he knew me well”,(p.4). Elie was a true believer in god and had an image of god that he had immense faith in. He was a very spiritual man and he was a very god- conscious person. To him, praying was like a second nature. He cried while praying for absolutely no reason, only because he felt the need to cry. He was so full of faith that, later on in the story, he was not able to fathom that god was allowing this to happen to his people. He did not believe that god was sitting idly, watching his creations suffer. Elie is fascinated by his religion and he was deeply connected with god. In addition, When Elie and Moishe began to converse with each other, Elie began to enjoy it. Elie and Moshe “spoke that way almost every evening, remaining in the synagogue long after the faithful had gone.”(p.5). Elie was very god- conscious and strived to learn everything that he could about his god and his religion. Elie was a very spiritually enlightened person and that may have possibly been the reason he was able to survive in the camps. This shows that Elie was very spiritual before the holocaust because he willingly believed in god and he loved to learn about Him and the Jewish religion, …show more content…
In the first place, when Elie and his father first arrived at camp, one of the soldiers struck Elie’s father, and Elie thinks to himself, “What had happened to me? My father had been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday. I would have dug my nails into these criminals flesh. Had I changed that much?”(p.39). Elie had been dehumanized early on in the camp. This quote shows not only how Elie has changed, but also that Elie realizes that he has changed. He allowed himself and his father to be brutally hit and to suffer the wrath of the Germans. Elie had changed spiritually because all of the pain and suffering around him had broken him and made him lose his faith. He had been so dehumanized that he allowed himself to watch his father be hit and not retaliate in any form. He had fallen prey to fear of the German Nazi soldiers. Elie had changed mentally because he no longer had a mindset to love and protect his family like he did before they came to the camps. Furthermore, after a few days of living in the concentration camps, Elie states that “At that moment in time, all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my stale crust of bread. The bread, the soup- those were my entire life. I was nothing but a body, Perhaps, even less, a famished