Elie Wiesel's Character Analysis

Even the deeply observant can become unfaithful. When the mass assassination of the Holocaust occurred, the religious Jews began to doubt God’s judgment. In Night, Elie Wiesel gives the reader a first hand account of what it was like to be separated from his family and be faced with the crisis of self-preservation versus looking out for others as he was raised to do. Elie comes to question his faith because of the cruelty and inhumanness that the Nazi’s show their prisoners. Before the concentration camps, Elie is deeply faithful, but when he is whisked away to Birkenau and the others that follow, his faith begins to falter. At the beginning of the book he is very religious, in the middle he starts to waver, and at the end he is seemingly lost his faith.

To begin, Elie is very religious. He uses his faith as his identity at the beginning of the novel. Elie was, “almost thirteen and deeply observant,” (Wiesel 3) exemplifying the early start to the tradition of religion. He used to cry when he would pray and when questioned by Moishe the Beadle about it or why he prayed at all he replied, “I don’t know,” (Wiesel 4) leaving him deeply

The fall of his religiousness starts at the New Year. Elie questions whether or not he and his people will ever see salvation and is confused why they continued to pray when God was seemingly nonexistent, “You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned,” (Wiesel 68). As their prayer draws to a close, Elie knows deep inside he no longer feels a connection with God, describing feeling like, “an observer, a stranger,” (Wiesel 68). Elie admits he, “had ceased to pray,” (Wiesel 45) following more of the atrocious acts commited by the Nazi’s. To rebel against the absence of his God he, “did not fast,” and explains why, “As I swallowed my soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him.” (Wiesel