We have all heard of the age old saying, “There are only two types of people that exist in a time or war and crisis, those who survive and those who die. ” Night is just an example of this that we see down on paper. Night is an autobiography written by Elie Wiesel. It is a true story about events that happened in his life. The intentions of this book was not to make the reader feel good. The author was not writing a story for a family to sit down, drink some coffee and read together to enjoy a good book. He is expressing his experiences and what he felt by writing it down.
He shows us what he felt thought the story. The story contains many elements of recession like the death of innocent people and of his family members, shows the limits and boundaries humans will go to survive and the absolute evil of man. It all starts in 1944 when him and his family was taken from their home to the Auschwitz concentration camps and then to Buchenwald. On their arrival Elie and his father were split from there mother and sister, who they would never see again. They started off by going through selections to see if they were fit enough to be put to work or if they should go ahead and be killed.
Elie and his father just slipped through because someone told them to lie about their age and say that Elie is older and that his father is younger. He exclaimed that all around them was the constant fear of death, “Was there a single place here where you were not in danger of death? ” (Chapter 3, pg. 37). Once they got taken to Buchenwald, they are put to work as slaves. The conditions worsen as the Jews begin to rely on personal survival. Sons begin to abandon and abuse their fathers. Elie himself begins to lose his humanity and his faith, both in God and in the people around him.
Then the nazis began to evacuate everyone from their camp because the Russians were about to invade. The prisoners were forced to run over fifty miles to Gleiwitz concentration camp. Many of them died from exposure to the cold weather and exhaustion. Once they finally made it to their destination there was only twelve that had survived. Elie and his father have only made it this far because they had mutual support from each other to make it through. However in the end, his father dies from physical abuse and Elie survives feeling less of a man filled with guilt.
Theme is the subject at topic in a piece of writing or a main overview of the story. There are many themes jumping around in Night. One of the themes is how important family is. “Men to the left! Women to the right! ” (Chapter 3, pg. 27). Those eight simple words stuck in Elies head for a while. He did not know that at this point he would never see his sister or mother again. Many of their goals was to try and stay with their family as long as possible. Some of the prisoners only survived as long as they did because of the thoughts of knowing their family is safe.
The next theme that I can see in night is Violence. Violence plays a major role in night as it is the bases of control. The Germans use violence to force the Jews into the camps and control them. The prisoners use violence to maintain their control and survive. We can see that the only effective way in this time to get what they wanted is to use violence. The last major theme that I see in Night is race. The whole reasoning behind what the Germans did to the jews was their race. They had no sympathy for the jews which gives us, the reader, to feel bad for the jews and everything they had to go through.
Characters in a story are the people that portray the thesis. Some of the major characters in Night is his family and especially his father. His family is his main motivation to stay alive and get out of it. His father has a major impact on him because that is who he knew and who he was with when he went through everything. He was a community elder that others went to for wise advice. There are also many characters in night that play a very small role but have a significant impact on Elie. Jullek is a musician he meets in Auschwitz.
He hears him playing late at night on his violin that really sticks out to him. Another small character in Night is Franek, a man Elie meets who is very selfish and all he wants is Elie’s gold crown. He does what it takes to get his gold crown because he was greedy and in love with power so he is willing to expose him for it. Another small character was Moshe the Beadle. He was an older guy who was close to Elie. He came in the beginning of the story to warn everyone that the war was coming near them and that they need to run, because of all the horrific things he has seen.
Nobody listens to him because they think he is crazy. They would soon come to realise that they should of listened to him. There are many more characters like this that Elie recognize as to why his experience went down that path that it did. Setting is the place or the surrounding that the story takes place. In Night, there are many places his experience happens and all of them represent something different. The story jumps out first in the ghetto, which is his home. They next start there journey to all the different camps he went too.
At first, Birkenau, then Auschwitz, to Buna, and last Buchenwald. As we travel throughout the story and are taken through the places he went, we see that the story does not get better. In fact, the condition get worse as every time he is moved, he is treated less of a person. The germans didn’t see them as people and so they treated them like animals. For example, in the story, Elie is transferred with many others in a train. In each train ride something dramatic happens to Elie or he sees something happening and that is dehumanization. The guards basically striped them of there hummanity.
Plot is the way you describe events that make up a story. In Night, Elie picks some very specific events that help express his story. He goes through his experiences in chronological order, but he does not use every detail that happened to him, he only used the ones that had an impact on him. One event that he remembers but is very small is when him, his father and all the other prisoners were running in the snow and after a long time of running they finally stopped. It was snowning and very cold, people were dying because they would fall asleep in the snow.
Elie and his father continued to work so they would stay awake. In the middle of working Elie’s dad looks at him and shot him a smile. He was very confused as to why his dad smiled at him. He could not come up with any reasoning as to why he thought that smiling was a good thing or how he could find anything good out of this. “I shall always remember that smile. From which world did it come? ” Chapter 6, pg. 86. Another event that stuck out to him a lot was when the Germans threw the bread into the train as they were traveling and people began to fight to the death for a bite.
The Germans found this to be very entertaining so they would continue to throw more bread just to see a bloodbath. The reason why this caught his eye so much was because a son even killed his own father for some bread. Even though they were starving and have been put through torture, Elie never thought that he would reach a point where he would kill his father, the man that he has gone through everything with, even though he turned away from him in his desperate time of need, he never thought to kill him. Tone is the attitude that is spread out through the story.
Night has a tone of being serious, sad, and honest. Elie Writes out what happens to him and does not try to sugar coat it. He is up front about the guilt he felt about losing his family, home, faith and turning away from his father in his last moments of life. He is not afraid to show us that the condition he went through brought out the darkside in him and in other prisoners. He also does not try to add a funny effect in his story. He keeps it very stern and straight forward. It is also important to see that they author is not angry or blaming other throughout his story.
His tone is the same as to he informs people of what happens and that he feels it should never happen again. One important factor in Nigth is identity. Identity is a fact or being of whom are what a person is. In night, the German strip them of their humanity. They take their clothes and make all the prisoners wear the same thing. They shave their heads and give them a number instead of a name. To the German they are no longer individual but animals, to an even further expense bodies. The longer they remain in the camps the longer they lose themselves.
They are denied a spirit, a soul, human dignity, and even their bodies are denied the sustenance needed to survive like food, water, adequate shelter, and sleep. One of the most important factors in his identity was his faith. “I did not deny God’s existence, but I doubted His absolute justice. ” Chapter 3, pg. 42. We can see through this quote that he does not lose the fact that he believes in God but he lost his trust and faith that he was here for him and that what the others were doing was not justice. He questioned why God would let them do this.
I really enjoyed reading Night. It was a hard story to read because of the intensity of his experience and the fact that it is a true story. He went through a lot of hard stuff that no man should have to. He showed us the pure evil of man and throughout the story we see that when it comes down to it and when the conditions are just unbearable, man will do anything they have to survive. Elie learned a lot from his experience. We can see that it was life changing for him and how he walked out of there with a new perspective on things.
It took him about ten years before he could write down everything that happened to him in the Holocaust, but it is worth it because we can imagine what they had to go through and for him to let go of what he experienced but writing it down. He is not hateful, blaming or even wanting revenge, he just feels that no man should have to go through what he did. “We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything-death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth. “
