Research Paper On Night By Elie Wiesel

Night Essay Humans often feel trapped when placed in situations for which there is no desirable outcome. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, a memoir of his experiences in the Nazi death camps, Wiesel, a fifteen year old boy, is forced to make impossible choices that no person, let alone a child, should have to make regarding his father. While Elie begins his internment in the camps attached to his father, after witnessing atrocities, his loyalty and human spirit is tested. Although at times Elie struggles to suppress his animal instincts, ultimately, he retains his humanity, suggesting that the human soul is never truly extinguished. Elie, a Talmudic scholar from Sighet, responds to his entrance to the sick universe of the camps by clinging tightly

After being separated from his mother and sisters and seeing babies being burnt alive, Elie attempts to remain connected to his father, his only link to his former identity. Miraculously, Elie and his father are spared from the fire pit and ordered to enter the barracks, at which posing they are then commanded to remove all of their clothing. At this point, Elie narrates, “Belt and shoes in hand, I let myself be dragged along to the barbers. Their clippers tore out our hair, shaved every hair on our bodies. My head was buzzing: the same thought surfacing over and over: not to be separated from my father” (35). As he is dragged to the barbers, Elie demonstrates his lose of agency over his own existence, losing his former ability to choose what he does. Even though the Nazis try to strip the prisoners of their humanities removing all means of self expression, Elie’s father is still of utmost importance, as his father represents his childhood. In this frightening world in which lie feels little control, he clings to his father since he knows his father represents a source of . Even as Elie becomes a

After several weeks in Auschwitz, the prisoners are sent a death march to a different location due to the Allies attempts to liberate the camp. The men march for three days, and those who can’t keep up are left in the snow to die. When they arrive at a resting place, Elie and his father rest after a rigorous journey, and learn that Rabbi Eliahu’s son had abandoned his father, running past him during the march. After he has partially lost hope in god during his time in the camps, Elie writes, “And in spite of myself a prayer formed inside me, a prayer to this G-d in whom I no longer belied. “Oh G-d, Master of the Universe, give me the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahu’s son has done” (91). Before Auschwitz, Elie was a boy who used to weep at the destruction of the temple, but now, he has lost faith in god as he has seen innocent lives taken in clear skies, with no resistance from God. Yet, Elie's desperation to hold on to his father, whom he knows her needs for moral support, prevails against his broken relationship to God. Given how vulnerable Elie feels to succumb to his animal instinct, he believes he needs an external or outside force to keep him in check, so he can honor his father, obeying the fifth commandment of respect one’s parents, along with many other commandments that once served as a foundation to him.Not only