The Human Condition In Night By Elie Wiesel

The human condition is a very malleable idea that is constantly changing due to the current state of mankind. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the concept of the human condition is displayed in the worst sense of the concept, during the Holocaust of WWII. During this time, multiple groups of people, most notably European Jews, were persecuted against and sent to horrible hard labor and killing centers such as Auschwitz. In this memoir, Wiesel uses complex figurative language such as similes and metaphors to display the theme that a person’s state as a human, both at a physical and emotional level, can be altered to extreme lengths, and even taken away from them, under the most extreme conditions.
Wiesel often uses complex similes to advance the plot of his memoir and add a meaningful perspective to the idea of what it means to be human in a psychological and emotional sense. For example, towards the beginning of the memoir, in the cattle car on the way to Auschwitz, Wiesel utilizes figurative language to describe the condition of the Jewish prisoners as being infected with madness: “Our very skin was aching. It was as though madness had infected all of us. We gave up. Silence fell again.” (Wiesel 26). This quote displays that the prisoners were under such horrible conditions that they were veritably infected with madness and forced to give up their lives to succumb to the Nazi officials and regime. The “madness” is used to describe how the prisoners were gradually