Night Elie Wiesel Language Analysis

The term Holocaust is now used to describe the mass genocide by the German Nazi regime during World War II. Millions of Jews and members of other persecuted groups deemed unacceptable by Hitler were tortured and murdered in the most gruesome of ways. Elie Wiesel was among the few survivors to have gone through Auschwitz, the primary death camp used by Nazi soldiers. His personal account of the Holocaust encompasses the death of his family, his loss of innocence, and his first-hand experience viewing the evil of man. Through the use of strategic diction and syntax, figurative language and imagery, Elie Wiesel makes the unimaginable horrors incredibly vivid and clear to his readers. Throughout the novel, the short and choppy sentences covey his sense of loss and sense of urgency. As the novel progressed, the complexity of the sentences declined, suggesting that he grew wearier with time. He began to lose his faith, and would likely have succumbed to hopeless exhaustion if he believed that his father was capable of surviving without him. Diction in phrases

In the quote, “the days were like nights, and the nights left the dregs of their darkness in our souls”, the subject of days is compared to nights, indicating the never ending darkness experienced during the Holocaust. He personifies death a countless number of times to describe how it was capable of sneaking up on the prisoners in their sleep and killing them effortlessly. That is why, towards the end of the book, Elie and his father refused to let one another fall asleep, knowing the consequences of doing so. An example of this personification would be “Death…would steal upon a sleeping person, steal into him and devour him bit by bit”. The figurative language lends itself to an emotional appeal, enhancing the reader’s ability to read and comprehend the unfathomable events that