Emotional Death In Elie Wiesel's Night

Emotional death is the absence of feeling, which mainly occurs during war after one has been so painstakingly injured and suffered immensely that the only way to survive is to rid themselves of any emotional ties. The “death” explains the perception and realization of survival throughout war. In the novel Night, Elie explains the feeling of emotional death, “One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me” (115). Elie is finally recognizing that he would be content with physical death because of his emotional detachment from the world. Veterans and survivors alike live through the suffering and are able to recount the events and how they reacted to the war as a whole. By being surrounded by violent suffering, emotional death eliminates the largest threat of not

The civil war was a bloody and gruesome fight to preserve a way of life that was looked upon as immoral and unconstitutional. John Sherman described in a letter the views of soldiers and men, “The same qualities that have enabled a single generation of men to develop the resources of a continent would enable us to destroy it more rapidly.” Government leaders and soldiers ignored the work that went into building America and were able to accept the killings fellow men or other innocent people without shedding a tear because of the need to feel superior to other men. Other leaders of war learned to settle with the consequences of war, “war means fighting and fighting means killing” (Forrest). The ability to kill because “it’s just war” is a learned characteristic after being involved in so many brutal and atrocious events. The human emotions become immune to sensitive events and the detachment is a mechanism to cope with the consequences of