Night By Elie Wiesel Analysis

Silent Night

While reading “Night” by Elie Wiesel, I came across a lot of key ideas and themes that ran consistently through out the book. Three major ideas that I felt were important were Elie’s trial to keep faith in his God, the use of silence and night and finally, having to keep your mind at ease amongst all the inhumanity. Although these ideas are different, they play off of one another.

Elie’s biggest struggle is to maintain his belief and fate in God’s hands. Elie’s battle with his faith is a prevailing conflict in Night. At the beginning of the memoir, his faith in God is undeniable. When asked why he prays to God, he answers, “Why did I pray? . . . Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” His belief is unstoppable; compassionate
However, it took a first hand experience for him to realize that the world is full of hate. As he hears about and experiences the Holocaust his faith starts to die. A good example of this is on the day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, thousands of men came to attend services. Thousands of voices repeated, "Blessed be the Name of the Eternal!" Eliezer thought, "Why, but why should I bless Him? Because he had thousands of children burned in his pits?... How could I say to Him: "Blessed art thou, Eternal, Master of the Universe, Who chose us from among the races to be tortured day and night? Praised be Thy Holy Name, Thou Who hast chosen us to be butchered on Thine altar?” This shows that through his journey, he has come to question why such a divine and pure God would let such cruelty be unleashed onto his people. His faith is equally shaken by the cruelty and selfishness he sees among the prisoners. He sees that the Holocaust exposes the self-interest, malicious, and cruelty of which everybody, the Nazis, his fellow prisoners, his fellow Jews, his brethren and even himself is capable of such sin. If the world is so horrible and cruel Elie feels God either must be horrible and cruel or must not exist at all. His feelings are shared within the Jewish community during that time. This is significant because for a religion to exist there has to be
Through the memoir you can feel his frustration towards the actions of his comrades. He exhausted trying to get a greater understanding of why the people were doing such things. His cynicism results from his horrid experiences with the Nazi discrimination and the cruelty of his fellow prisoners. Experiences like this usually bring out the worst in people and Elie was no exception. Although he didn’t physically exert cruelty on his father and prison mates, he still found himself having such thoughts. His revelation of people’s behaviors is a common topic in the memoir. A lot of Elie’s thoughts revolve around this. The first hardhearted cruelty Eliezer experiences are that of the Nazis. Yet, when the Nazis first appear, they do not seem monstrous in any way. Eliezer recounts, “Our first impressions of the Germans were most reassuring. . . . Their attitude toward their hosts was distant, but polite.” So many aspects of the Holocaust are unfathomable, but perhaps the most difficult to understand is how human beings could so heartlessly slaughter millions of innocent victims. Wiesel highlights this inconceivable tragedy by putting the Nazis into focus first as human beings and then as animals that thrive on the grief of those who are different. Furthermore, “Night” demonstrates that hate only propagates hate. Instead of comforting each other and