Night By Elie Wiesel Character Analysis

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In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, “Night”, readers see a dramatic change from the young, sensitive and spiritual individual to a, boy with the mindset of an adult that is spiritually dead and is unemotional. Elie shows this in his memoir by rewriting what he saw, thought, or what he heard while in concentration camps, this occurs, in the three sections of the memoir. In the first section of the book, Eile begins the transformation from a sensitive and spiritual boy to the opposite. Elie starts describes the first night, he was in a concentration camp, and how that affected him through his sight, by saying “Never shall I forget the little faces of the children whose bodies I saw turn into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget…show more content…
Just as the the Jewish holiday, Rosh Hashanah, was about to come, Elie thought,” ‘What are You God,’ I thought angrily, ‘Compared to the afflicted crowd, proclaiming You their faith, their anger, their revolt? What does Your greatness mean, Lord of the universe, in the face of all this weakness, this decomposition, and this decay? Why do You still trouble their sick minds, their crippled bodies’ “(Wiesel, 63). Elie describes the thought of why would anyone still believe in a God if he has allowed people to be burned, people to be shot, people to be hung death, and even children being hung to death. This is also the reason Elie did not decide to participate in the Day of Atonement, which involves fasting. Elie once more, shows that he still has a few emotions left inside inside his body.. Zalman is running alongside, Elie, when he begins to have stomach cramps, “ His trousers lowered, he let himself sink down. That is the last picture of him. I do not think it can have been the SS who finished him, because no one had notices. He must have been trampled to death beneath the feet of thousands of men who followed us. I quickly forgot him”(Wiesel,82). In this quote, Elie is originally describing a person he met at the work camp, and who always prayed. However, this is not the point, the last four words of the quote, show to what severity, Elie’s emotions been dropped. As a normal, 15 or 16…show more content…
As Elie describes what occurred after his father's death, “There were not prayers at his grave. No candles were lit to his memory. His last word was my name. A summons, to which I did not respond”(Wiesel, 106). In this, Elie describes what happened after his father died, and how he was religiously summoned, but there was no faith left in him to respond to God’s call. I believe this is this is the ultimate low in Elie’s religion, seeing that he could not even pray over his father, or respond to the summons. This is the lowest amount of religion, however, the low of Elie’s emotion is quite horrible. Elie sees himself for the first time after being liberated,”From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they sated into mine, has never left me”(Wiesel, 109). This is the most powerful phrase from the book that describes how he felt, about himself. This is clearly shown through the use of “his” instead of my, he had to describe the look in his eyes as someone else's. Thus showing, the distaste of his own self as he came out of the Holocaust and wanting to now live a normal life. Through Elie’s use of a 3rd person possessive pronoun, he is able to create such meaning behind only a singular word. Elie also uses such harsh situations to point out the loss of faith or emotion. Throughout the memoir, Elie uses literary devices, such as third person possessive
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