In both Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Elie Wiesel’s Night the authors tell a story of how through adversity, they lose faith in their god. In Persepolis, Marji lives in Iran during a time of revolution. As a child she dreamed of being a prophet and was always very religious. However, as time goes on and her situation becomes worse, she begins to lose faith in her god. In Night, Elie is a Romanian Jewish boy during World War II. He is forced to leave his home and travel to concentration camps all throughout Europe. Elie finds himself in the middle of the Holocaust and he is threatened by death everyday. The horrible experiences he goes through leave him questioning his god. Wiesel and Satrapi suggest that during a time of crisis, one’s …show more content…
For example, as the Jewish year is about to end, Elie begins to question his god. Elie feels that his god has abandoned him and at one point says, “I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God” (Wiesel 66). Elie blames God for what has happened to him and wants to know how his almighty father has let his people be tortured. He no longer feels the strong connection he had with God and now he is blatantly protesting against him. He argues that it is God’s job to not let things like the Holocaust happen and the fact that it is happening shows that God does not care about him. Later during Yom Kippur, Elie chose not to fast. He felt that eating is more important than faith. At one point he thought, “There was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God's silence” (Wiesel 69). In this instance Elie is going against his religion by breaking the custom of fasting during Yom Kippur. On the day that is supposed to be the holiest of the year, Elie defies God and refuses to listen to one of his religion’s traditions. At the end of the book, Elie is barely surviving. His father has died and he no longer has anyone of thing in his life that matters. At one point he says “I remained in Buchenwald until April 11. I shall not describe my life during that period. It no longer …show more content…
Growing up in Iran for Marjane Satrapi was not easy. She had to deal with many heartbreaks including the death of her grandfather. After Marji hears of this, there is a panel where God tries to talk to Marji, but she refuses to respond (Satrapi 25). This is significant because up until that point she worshiped him with all her heart and even believed she was a prophet. This was the first time we saw her rebel against her religion. Later on, Marji gets word that her Uncle Anoosh was executed. This was her breaking point. She and her uncle were so close and when he died she felt like she had no where to go. This feeling is described in a panel where she is floating through space with no where to go (Satrapi 71). In the panel before, she is pictured as screaming at god to get away from her (Satrapi 70). She is upset that he has left Anoosh in his time of need, so what make her different. This made her think what would God do for her in her time of need. The realization that God would not fix all her problems shocked her. Now that she has totally rejected God, she starts to make choices that put herself in danger. For example, at one point, she leaves her house wearing western clothing. This is against the law and this almost puts her in jail (Satrapi 133). She did not have God to help her choose right from wrong, and this lack of guidance almost lead her to
Throughout his recollections, it is clear that Elie has a constant struggle with his belief in God. Prior to Auschwitz, Elie was motivated, even eager to learn about Jewish mysticism. Yet, after he had been exposed to the reality of the concentration camps, Elie began to question God. According to Elie, God “caused thousands of children to burn...He kept six crematoria working day and night...He created Auschwitz, Birkenau, [and] Buna”(67). Elie could not believe the atrocities going on around him. He could not believe that the God he followed tolerated such things. During times of sorrow, when everyone was praying and sanctifying His name, Elie no longer wanted to praise the Lord; he was at the point of giving up. The fact that the “Terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent”(33) caused Elie to lose hope and faith. When one cho...
In the novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel changes immensely by the experiences he encounters on his journey through the ghettos, labor camps, and concentration camps. These experiences alter his perspective and faith in humanity; consequently distorting his personality. At the beginning of the book, Wiesel is a religious and faithful teenager. He wants to expand his religious studies to mysticism and explore the Jewish religion as well. This begins to fade when he realizes that Jewish people, including babies and small children, are being burned in the crematorium and thrown into mass graves or holes in the ground. He also sees others being tortured and starved by the S.S officers. As a result, he begins to realize that if God was the divine
“Blessed be Gods name? Why? But why would I bless him?” Elie says that on page 67 of this book. To me, when Elie says this, he shows his anger towards God and about everything that he is letting happen. He began to wonder, if he was God, why he was letting all the Germans do horrible things to them. However, this never made any sense to Elie. He was always contemplating the existence of God. On page 69 while supper is being served and the Jews are supposed to be fasting because of Yom Kippur, this Jewish holiday would require them to fast, Elie’s father required him to eat because it was to risky for Elie to starve or become sick if he didn’t. Elie then says, “And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast.” “I no longer accepted God’s silence.” Elie ...
Due to the atrocities of the concentration camps, Elie lost his faith in God. Early on in the story, Elie used to leap over ancient temples and study the Kabbalah. In his old town, he used to complain to Moishe the Beadle “ I told him how unhappy I was not to able to find in Sighet a master to teach me the Zohar.”(Wiesel,5) This shows him complaining about not having a teacher. But as he started to go through the camps, he saw what was going on and started to
In the memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel remembers his time at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Elie begins to lose his faith in God after his faith is tested many times while at the concentration camp. Elie conveys to us how horrific events have changed the way he looks at his faith and God. Through comments such as, “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God, my soul, and turned my dreams into dust,” he reveals the toll that the Holocaust has taken on him. The novel begins during the years of 1942-1944 in Sighet, Transylvannia, Romania. Elie Wiesel and his family are deported and Elie is forced to live through many horrific events. Several events such as deportation, seeing dead bodies while at Auschwitz, and separation from his mother and sisters, make Elie start to question his absolute faith in God.
In the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the author displays the transformation and the evolution of the average human being, through a horrible experience that he personally went through. When he is transported from one place to another, forced to leave everything behind, to go live in the ghettos, then in a horrible concentration camp. In the concentration camp, Elie experiences numerous events that challenge his physical and mental limits. Some of these events made him question his faith, and whether there is such a thing as God, turning him from a conservative Jew to a reform Jew. Elie doesn’t love the concentration camps, yet he doesn’t hate it, in fact he does not care anymore.
Throughout the narrative Night, the author Elie Wiesel a young teen who was very confident in his faith experiences multiple hardships that cause him to question what he once believed to be true. His religion stayed strong up until it became obvious to him that God was causing his people to suffer.
After a brief stay at Auschwitz, they are moved to a new camp, Buna. At Buna, Elie goes through the dehumanizing process of the concentration camps. Both he and his father experience severe beatings at the hand of the kapos. All the prisoners are overworked and undernourished. Many lose faith in God, including Elie. He witnesses several hangings, one of a boy with an angelic face, and sees him struggle for over thirty minutes fighting for his life. To a stranger's cry of "Where is God now?", Elie answers: "He is hanging here on this gallows...." (p. 62). As Elie witnesses the hanging of the young pipel, he feels that it is his God who is hanging on the gallows. Elie i...
The Holocaust survivor Abel Herzberg has said, “ There were not six million Jews murdered; there was one murder, six million times.” The Holocaust is one of the most horrific events in the history of mankind, consisting of the genocide of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, mentally handicapped and many others during World War II. Adolf Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany, and his army of Nazis and SS troops carried out the terrible proceedings of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, and suffers a relentless “night” of terror and torture in which humans were treated as animals. Wiesel discovers the “Kingdom of Night” (118), in which the history of the Jewish people is altered. This is Wiesel’s “dark time of life” and through his journey into night he can’t see the “light” at the end of the tunnel, only continuous dread and darkness. Night is a memoir that is written in the style of a bildungsroman, a loss of innocence and a sad coming of age. This memoir reveals how Eliezer (Elie Wiesel) gradually loses his faith and his relationships with both his father (dad), and his Father (God). Sickened by the torment he must endure, Wiesel questions if God really exists, “Why, but why should I bless him? Because he in his great might, had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? (67). Throughout the Holocaust, Wiesel’s faith is not permanently shattered. Although after his father dies, his faith in god and religion is shaken to the core, and arguably gone. Wiesel, along with most prisoners, lose their faith in God. Wiesel’s loss of religion becomes the loss of identity, humanity, selfishness, and decency.
In the novel Night, Elie Wiesel faces the horrors of the Holocaust, where he loses many friends and family, and almost his life. He starts as a kind young boy, however, his environment influences many of the decisions he makes. Throughout the novel, Elie Wiesel changes into a selfish boy, thinks of his father as a liability and loses his faith in God as an outcome his surroundings.
A simple act of kindness and support can possibly be the savior to someone else’s misery. In the novel, Night, written by Eliezer Wiesel, Elie portrays the daily lifestyle of the Jews during the Holocaust, and shares his personal experiences. He goes through hardships as he travels from the ghettos to the concentration camps with his one and only family member remaining, his father. The S.S. soldiers take the author’s mother and his two sisters away from him as they arrive at the ghetto because they separating women from men. Throughout the novel, Elie experiences personality adaptations and loses his faith in God all due to the loss of humanity in his world. With this in mind, he bases his survival on his determination and not his luck. Eliezer survives the Holocaust as a result to the hope he provides for his father and the support he receives from others throughout his journey.
Every man, woman, and child has his or her breaking point, no matter how hard they try to hold it back. In Night by Elie Wiesel the main theme of the entire book is the human living condition. The quality of human life is overwhelming because humans have the potential to make amazing discoveries that help all humans. Elie Wiesel endures some of the most cruel living conditions known to mankind. This essay describes the themes of faith, survival, and conformity in Night by Elie Wiesel.
In the beginning of the memoir, Elie is an extremely passionate and devout Jew, but as the story progresses, Elie sees horrendous things in the concentration camps, and as a result, he slowly loses his faith. Elie displays his extreme devotion in the beginning stages of the memoir when he states, “By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple. I cried because something inside me felt the need to cry” (Wiesel 4). Elie is clearly very fond of learning more about his religion and connecting to God in a spiritual way. Furthermore, Elie is only thirteen years old, so when he says he cries because he feels the need to cry, he is exhibiting incredible passion. Elie reveals signs of change and begins to lose his faith in God just a few moments after arriving at the concentration camp when he says, “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes” (Wiesel 34). Elie exclaims that he cannot worship God anymore due to the awful things he has seen at Auschwitz. He does not want to believe in the being that could have allowed these awful events to happen. This is a completely different Elie from the loving and caring Elie in the ghetto. Elie also uses rep...
The first example of Elie loosing his faith is when he arrived at Auschwitz. Elie and his father are directed to go to the left. A prisoner then informs them that they are on their way to the crematory. Elie's father recites the Kaddish or prayer for the dead.
She says, “I was born with religion” (pg 6). Unlike other children, Marji wants to be a prophet when she is older. This idea is not normal for a child or anyone under the Muslim religion since prophets have always been men. Her classmates laugh at her dream of becoming a prophet and her teacher speaks to her parents, but Marji stays true to her passion. Marji believes religion should be used to create good things and change anything bad. Growing up, Marji doesn’t understand why her maid cannot eat at the dinner table with her family or why her friends do not drive a Cadillac like her father. Marji is a child and does not understand the concept of social classes. As a result, Marji sees religion as a way to change these things. She believes that in the name of God she could make sure everyone is treated equally. Marji’s opinion is untainted by any other connotations of religion. She is forming her own opinions and they are good. Satrapi uses her perspective of religion as a child to show how pure religion could be in the eyes of someone young. The perspective of a child is appealing to the reader because it is innocent and naive. Satrapi is trying to make the point that if everyone saw religion in a good way it could be used for good