Mankind's Nightmare

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Recommended: Night by elie wiesel symbolism

“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” -Elie Wiesel The above quote by Elie Wiesel is During this time and soon after, Jews were seen as subhuman and later dehumanized completely. As World War II, progressed, Hitler and his advisors had seen the only way to fully answer the Jewish Question was to implement the Final Solution, which was to exterminate all of the Jews in Europe. Some of these horrors of the Final Solution can be seen in the novel Night by Elie Wiesel. In Night, Wiesel takes the reader into the eyes of young Eliezer during the Holocaust. In the novel Night, Elie Wiesel successfully executes his attempt to not let people born after the Holocaust and those who did not witness the atrocities during this time ever forget or try to claim the falseness of the cruelty towards Jews and other ethnic groups during this time through his use of various symbols, his precise word choice throughout the novel, and his tone of not only one victim, but 11 million. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses various symbols in a manner to convey a deeper meaning through common objects. Wiesel, for example, conveys the symbol of fire to show the cruelty and the power of the Nazi’s during the Holocaust. He begins saying this in Section 2 when Madame Schachter envisions fire in the cattle train on the way to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This allows the reader to understand the issues that are soon to become relevant later in the novel. Also, Wiesel sees the symbol of a corpse when in Section 9, he looks into a mirror after being liberated from the concentration camps by the Allied forces, and in Section 4, when Elie sees the young boy hanging from the gallows in the Appelplatz. These two occurrences of the theme of corpses display Elie Wiesel’s... ... middle of paper ... ...use when most people think of nature and how the world operates, they believe that there is a higher being that controls all of this; however, Elie Wiesel challenges this notion by stating that man is the master of nature and of the world. The serious tone and the distinct word choice throughout Night is what allows the reader to infer and analyze what Elie Wiesel might not have wanted to state flat-out. Throughout Night, Elie Wiesel displays the horrors and gives an eyewitness account to the gruesome and gritty details that occurred during the Holocaust through many different symbols, precise word choice, and through his tone. This allows anyone who reads Night to understand the extreme cruelty and harm towards Jews and many others ethnic groups during this time period and to make sure that nothing like the Holocaust never happens ever again for future generations.

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