Literature Analysis #1

Literary Analysis : Night

By: Elie Wiesel

      Setting/ Plot Overview: This amazing and life changing story is narrated by the author himself Elie Wiesel. His stories tell about the hardships of Jewish people during the time of Nazi Germany and Hitler's rule. Elie provides a comparison of how happy his life was and how successful his family came to be before the German's occupied his nation of Hungary and after when all the Hungarian Jews were sent to Ghetto's and then after labor and concentration camps. He depicts the increasingly repressive measures of how his life quickly becomes an empty hole of pain and suffering in which he endeavors the pure existence of hell on Earth.The only individual person keeping him alive during this whole ordeal is is his own father who eventually becomes very ill and then gets sent to the crematorium where Elie does not know whether he was deceased or burned alive.

     Major Characters: Elie Wiesel is a protagonist in this story. He is much more than the traditional type of protagonist because of his direct experience with the Holocaust itself.In the story Elie is a young boy and ambitious when it came to acknowledging his own faith and religion. But as Elie goes through the hardships of the holocaust he begins to lose his ability to believe in his faith. In the end of his experience he comes to hate This "God" of his with all the fury of his soul. Elie even quoted "Blessed be god's name? Why, but why would I bless him? Every Fiber in me rebelled. Because he caused thousands of children to burn in his mass graves? Because he kept six crematoria working day and night including Sabbath and Holy days? Because in his great might he had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of Death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, and our brothers end up in furnaces? Praised be thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on thine altar?".

     Shlomo was Elie's father in the story and in real life. Shlomo is the only constant presence in the story, and as the story develops so does the amplitude of horror that he experiences.  Although we do not get to experience Shlomo's thoughts and feelings it is obvious that he is a loving father towards his son. And like his son, Elie is the only one that keeps his father alive. The development of Shlomo is that of a a gradual decline in morality due to the hunger, the pain, and the constant fear of dying. He is the upmost important character in the plot because he reminds Elie of the commitment to his family, of his duty, and of the goodness that is left in his heart.

     Symbols: Moshe the Beadle is a major symbol in this story. Looking at Moshe, he is an old, innocent peasant who minds his own business and is very knowledgeable in his religion.As soon as he tastes a glimpse of how truly evil Nazi Germany really is, he begins to lose all faith in humanity, hope, and even himself. Moshe represents the evil that stemmed off the hatred and genocide that everyone experienced during that time period. Fire is also a major symbol that provides a premonition to the horrors that await the Jewish people at the concentration camps. Fire is the agent in the crematoria where people are burned alive and where innocent children and babies are murdered without mercy. Fire is also religiously affiliated with Gehenna - the Jewish Version of Hell- where the wicked are punished by fire.

     Themes: I believe that one of the central themes of Night was that of Silence and The Belief of a False God. In one of Night's most Famous passages, Eliezer states, " Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence that deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live". It is the Idea of God's silence that he finds most troubling, as this description of an event at Buna reveals: as the Gestapo hangs a young boy, a man asks, " Where is God?" and yet the only response is total silence throughout the camp. Elie and his campanions are left to wonder how an all-knowing, all powerful God can allow such a horror and cruelty to occur, especially to such devout worshipers. The existence of this horror, and the lack of a divine response, forever shakes Eliezer's faith in God.