Night By Elie Wiesel Analysis

What does it mean to be a human ?, does it mean to have a meaning of life or the awareness of death. To be human means to know how the things around us affect us, either emotionally or physically. In his memoir Night, Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, describes his experiences in the Holocaust and the horrific conditions in and around the concentration camps. Through these ideas he realizes that he is being treated like a wild animal because he is being controlled and punished by the Nazi soldiers in a way that dehumanizes him in the way he thinks about himself and others. In the scene where Elie Wiesel and his father, and the the other people are being moved to a different concentration camp. Elie encounters an old man who hides and saves

For example, when discussing the old man being attacked by the by his son for the piece of bread Elie writes “A shadow had lain down beside him. And this shadow threw itself over him. Stunned by the blows, the old man was crying: Meir, my little Meir! Don't you recognize me… You're killing your father… I have bread… for you too… for you too…”(101). Elie Wiesel uses the metaphor to describe the old man's son as a “shadow”, Elie writes this to show how how the son is not in the right state of mind because normally children would look up to their parents or care and protection, but in this case his son totally disregards that it is his father and continues to beat him. From this we can infer that the son no longer is in a good mental state because he has opposed his father at this crucial moment to get whatever he is need of. The punctuation in the same scene also shows the claim that when kids are faced upon extramarital conditions like malnourishment they will do anything in their power to live including turning on their parents. Ellipsis are used to show a trailing off or a pause, in this situation, the reason the old man pauses is to show how the old man is struggling from the punches his son is throwing his way. This shows how both the son and the

For example when discussing the death of the father, Wiesel says “The old man mumbled something, groaned, and died. Nobody cared. His son searched him, took the crust of bread, and began to devour it.”(101). The shortness of the sentence “Nobody cared.” gives a feeling of sadness because we are given an emotional observation that shows how a parental bond has been lost through the steps of survival. This shows how little impact the words had on the people who were trying to survive and how they were fighting for their