NIght Response

“What idea does the author develop regarding the nature or effect of threatening forces?”

As human beings, we are often faced with choices, challenges, and threats as we

grow and mature. Although how we act in these situations defines who we are, the

underlying importance of these issues is how we come to our final decision and how we

face the threats that lie before us. In Elie Wiesels’s memoir Night, a huge groups of

people have their lives threatened and taken away as Primo Levi said “… at a yes, or a

no” and this shows just how predominant of an effect this threat had on the Jewish

people. Many characters in this memoir chose to address this very real threat in different

ways and because of this, the threat was allowed to flourish. The author, Elie Wiesel

wrote this memoir in order to show the great evil that lurks inside of some humans and

when that evil is unleashed, action must be taken to prevent it from turning cancerous and

taking more casualties. The various threats brought up in this memoir have shown that a

threatening force, no matter how small, has the ability to hurt us, turn us against each

other and most of all, change the very foundation of which we stand.

In taking away what one believes in, the ability to mold them into an object

becomes well within grasp. Throughout Night, we are told how under Nazi command, the

Jewish people were transformed from normal, hard wo...