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- Eliezer feels relief, not grief, over his father’s death. He is left feeling empty and alone, his faith in God and human beings, and even faith in himself, is lost. As the book concludes, American forces liberate the camp, which should be cause for celebration. Eliezer, however, seeing himself in a mirror, sees only a “corpse.”
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Why did Elie Wiesel write Night? How does Wiesel characterize himself/Eliezer in the novel? What is the significance of the novel’s first-person point of view? What does night symbolize? What gives Eliezer the strength to survive the Holocaust? What happens when Moishe is deported from Sighet? What does Madame Schächter’s nightmare foreshadow?
Towards the end of the novel, despite the obvious end of the war, the Nazis are unwilling to surrender their prisoners, and Eliezer’s situation takes an impossible turn for the worse. He’s forced to contend with horrible conditions and watch his remaining loved ones suffer.
- Night Themes
- Style, Tone, and Figurative Language in Night
- Analysis of Symbols in Night
Faith
Throughout the novel, Elie is forced to question his faith in God. When God does not step in and stop the horrors around him, Elie has to consider that his faith may have been wrong all along. He learned that God demands sacrifice but is, in the end, compassionate and loving, that’s far from what he learned firsthand during his experiences in the novel, Night. Despite the fact that Eliezer says he’s lost his faith several times, Wiesel includes religious allusions and figurative language that...
Silence/Indifference
This is one of the primary themes in the novel, and one that can be found in Wiesel’s other works as well as lectures. Elie is constantly bothered by the silence of God and the silence of other men and women in Europe throughout the novel. There are numerous examples of indifference throughout the novel. Elie notes the village’s indifferent reaction when Moishereturns with news of what he’s seen, the German people’s ability to ignore what’s going on right in front of their faces, and of cours...
Inhumanity
Indifference and silence go hand in hand with inhumanity in Night. It’s impossible to read this novel and not walk away feeling horrified by the inhuman practices promoted and carried out by the Nazi regime. Eliezer has trouble making sense of the world after seeing some of the terrible things that happened inside and outside the camps. One such scene comes after he’s arrived with his father and they walk past a pit in which S.S. soldiers are burning the bodies of children. Additionally, the...
Throughout Night, Wiesel writes about Elie’s experiences in a detached tone. He uses short sentences and clear words to report on what Elie saw and what he felt. Wiesel was trying to put his experiences into words, in a way that accurately represented them but allowed him to keep some distance from the character of Eliezer. The text is sparse, with...
Night
One of the most obvious and important symbols in the novel is night. By naming the novel “night” and pushing themes of religious doubt, it’s important to consider Genesis and the passages regarding God’s creation of the earth. First, the Bile says, there was “darkness upon the face of the deep.” It’s this darkness, with the absence of God, that Eliezer lives through. Light is absent from some of the most important scenes in the novel, such as when Eliezer’s father is talking to him about the...
Fire
Fire is a symbol of death and destruction in Night. It is used by the Nazis to destroy evidence of their genocide. It first appears in a horrifying passage when Madame Schächter cries out “Fire! Look at the flames! Flames everywhere,” when the train arrives in Birkenau. When the train pulls in, Eliezer can smell burning flesh immediately. This is something that haunts the rest of the novel. The fire is an ever-present reminder of the deaths waiting for those able to escape the initial threat...
Corpses
Corpses appear throughout the novel, bringing into the light the true extent of the horrors the Nazi regime perpetrated on the Jewish people. Eliezer is forced to witness deaths and sees piles of bodies. The image of a corpse also appears at the end of the novel when Eliezer looks at himself in the mirror and thinks that he looks more than a corpse than he does a living person. It’s a symbol for the death of who he was, the strength of his faith, and the loss of the 11 million who did in the...
The novel concludes that “here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends” and “Everyone lives and dies for himself alone .” Summary of Night. Night records the happenings when Elie Wiesel was a Jewish teenager Eliezer Wiesel.
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Elie Wiesel wrote Night after observing a ten-year-long period of silence after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in Europe at the end of the Second World War. Wiesel, when speaking about the novel, described it as picking up where The Diary of Anne Frank left off.
