Night Essay

Usually, every story has a powerful ending that will keep the reader wondering, most likely in a good way, leaving the reader satisfied with the ending. Night does not follow the pattern. Elie didn’t want to end a sad story in a happy way, he wanted to end it the way it actually happened. It ends with the metaphor that will send a shiver down the readers spine. The story ends, “One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look on his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” By ending the story this way, the reader finally realizes the horrible consequences of the Holocaust and the effects it had on Jewish people. Through neglect, malnutrition, and beatings, people had lost the feeling of life and turned into walking corpses, separated from their former selves. Many people weren’t even recognizable after the Holocaust, even by their own family.

Concentration camps slowly ripped away the past identities of their prisoners, shaping them into new people. People who have physically seen and felt the evils of the Nazis. Elie felt the fear of death being always right around the corner, so it shaped him into a corpse of his past life. It changed everyones life. Elie Wiesel states, “The time: After the war. The place: Paris. A young man struggles to readjust to life. His mother, his father, his small sister are gone. He is alone. On the verge of despair. And yet he does not give up. On the contrary, he strives to find a place among the living. He acquires a new language. He makes a few friends who, like himself, believe that the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evi...

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...on of his former self.

Elie was affected in the following ways: physically, emotionally and spiritually. The Holocaust had changed him into a completely different person. The life had left his body and he became a walking corpse. Elie went into the camp a Jew, but when he came out, his views on Religion had changed greatly. His former self would have been disgusted with the broken down version of himself. He executed actions in Auschwitz that he would never have even considered back in the ghetto, things that broke down his body into the shallow corpse that he observed in the mirror. Elie didn’t have any access to mirrors in the camp or anytime after he left the ghetto in Sighet .He went through a tragedy without even knowing what he looked like throughout it. At the end of Elie’s tragic experience, he observed himself, only seeing a dying version of himself.