Night By Elie Wiesel Analysis

Silent Night

While reading “Night” by Elie Wiesel, I came across a lot of key ideas and themes that ran consistently through out the book. Three major ideas that I felt were important were Elie’s trial to keep faith in his God, the use of silence and night and finally, having to keep your mind at ease amongst all the inhumanity. Although these ideas are different, they play off of one another.

Elie’s biggest struggle is to maintain his belief and fate in God’s hands. Elie’s battle with his faith is a prevailing conflict in Night. At the beginning of the memoir, his faith in God is undeniable. When asked why he prays to God, he answers, “Why did I pray? . . . Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” His belief is unstoppable; compassionate
God is content, and he cannot imagine living without faith in a higher being. But shortly into the memoir, this faith comes up against several hurdles as he tries to prove his faith to God. Eliezer’s faith started at a young age. While most teenaged boys were out playing in the streets, he was in the temple studying the Cabbala even if it was against his father’s wishes. Mosh the Beadle helped him to focus his studies in Jewish mysticism and come to the conclusion that God is everywhere in the world, that nothing exists without God. Elie has grown up believing that everything on Earth reflects God’s holiness and power and everything is influenced by his holiness. His faith is based on the idea that God is everywhere, all the time, that his godliness touches every aspect of his daily life. Since God is of no sin and his studies teach him that God is everywhere in the world Elie as a younger boy is naive to think the world must therefore be good.
Elie’s faith in the goodness of the world is almost destroyed by the cruelty and evil he encountered during the Holocaust.
However, it took a first hand experience for him to realize that the world is full of hate. As he hears about and experiences the Holocaust his faith starts to die. A good example of this is on the day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, thousands of men came to attend services. Thousands of voices repeated, "Blessed be the Name of the Eternal!" Eliezer thought, "Why, but why should I bless Him? Because he had thousands of children burned in his pits?... How could I say to Him: "Blessed art thou, Eternal, Master of the Universe, Who chose us from among the races to be tortured day and night? Praised be Thy Holy Name, Thou Who hast chosen us to be butchered on Thine altar?” This shows that through his journey, he has come to question why such a divine and pure God would let such cruelty be unleashed onto his people. His faith is equally shaken by the cruelty and selfishness he sees among the prisoners. He sees that the Holocaust exposes the self-interest, malicious, and cruelty of which everybody, the Nazis, his fellow prisoners, his fellow Jews, his brethren and even himself is capable of such sin. If the world is so horrible and cruel Elie feels God either must be horrible and cruel or must not exist at all. His feelings are shared within the Jewish community during that time. This is significant because for a religion to exist there has to be
people who believe in it and during the Holocaust many lost faith. Yet those who survived ironically enough used the “evil and disgusting” God to find understanding and a place to put their mind at ease. Eliezer does struggle with his faith, but his fight should not be confused with a complete abandonment of his faith, although possible, it’s hard to break a Jewish man from his beliefs. Elie’s battle doesn’t weaken his belief in God, it helps him become closer to Him. When Moshe the Beadle is asked why he prays, he replies, “I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.” In other words, questioning is fundamental to the idea of faith in God. The Holocaust forces Eliezer to ask horrible questions about the nature of good and evil and about whether God exists. But the very fact that he asks these questions reflects his commitment to God. Elizer’s struggle with his faith is one of millions. His decision to include such detail and reference to the Jewish faith in his memoir helped to get across how strongly their way of life was and is depicted by the word of God.

Eliezer’s struggles and battles weren’t confined to the borders of his faith, there were also battles with the cruelty of the people.
Through the memoir you can feel his frustration towards the actions of his comrades. He exhausted trying to get a greater understanding of why the people were doing such things. His cynicism results from his horrid experiences with the Nazi discrimination and the cruelty of his fellow prisoners. Experiences like this usually bring out the worst in people and Elie was no exception. Although he didn’t physically exert cruelty on his father and prison mates, he still found himself having such thoughts. His revelation of people’s behaviors is a common topic in the memoir. A lot of Elie’s thoughts revolve around this. The first hardhearted cruelty Eliezer experiences are that of the Nazis. Yet, when the Nazis first appear, they do not seem monstrous in any way. Eliezer recounts, “Our first impressions of the Germans were most reassuring. . . . Their attitude toward their hosts was distant, but polite.” So many aspects of the Holocaust are unfathomable, but perhaps the most difficult to understand is how human beings could so heartlessly slaughter millions of innocent victims. Wiesel highlights this inconceivable tragedy by putting the Nazis into focus first as human beings and then as animals that thrive on the grief of those who are different. Furthermore, “Night” demonstrates that hate only propagates hate. Instead of comforting each other and
working as a unit in times of difficulty, the prisoners respond to their circumstances by turning on one another. At the beginning of the fifth section, Eliezer refers to them as “functionaries of death.” The Kapos’ position symbolizes the way the Holocaust’s cruelty bred cruelty in its victims, turning people against each other, as self-preservation became the highest virtue.
Finally, silence. Silence is one of the more impacting ideas brought out by Elie. In “Night”, Eliezer states, “Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.” It is the idea of God’s silence that he finds most troubling, as this description of an event at Buna reveals: as the Gestapo hangs a young boy, a man asks, “Where is God?” yet the only response is “Total silence throughout the camp.” Once again Eliezer is left to question how an all-knowing, all powerful God can allow such repulsion and vindictiveness to occur, especially to people who live by his word. The silence from his God in response to the hanging forever haunts Elie and creates more questioning. “The Bible begins with God’s creation of the earth. When God first begins his creation, the earth is “without form, and void; and darkness [is] upon the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2, King James Version). God’s first act is to create light and dispel this darkness. Darkness and night therefore symbolize a world without God’s presence.”1 There’s no better way to describe night in this memoir than the fact that night resembles the absence of God. This is ironic because most people find God only in silence. In the beginning of the book, Elie describes how in the ghetto, as his father was telling stories, "Night fell," foreshadowing the news of their deportation. The concept of "night" falling on the Jews becomes a running theme throughout the book. There are several instances where the phrase precedes some dreadful event. "Night" carries with it the idea of uncertainty and fear. Representing death, night becomes an imagery of the unknown. As Elie and the other prisoners prepare to leave Buna, there is a greater fear of what is to come: "The gates of the camp opened. It seemed that an even darker night was waiting for us on the other side." This again foreshadows what is waiting for them on the other side and that there will be no God waiting for them on the inside. Night brings out the worst dangers and becomes bleaker as the novel progresses.
These three ideas, which Elie consciously integrates into “Night”, are some of which help you dig deep into the truly horrifying events the Elie Wiesel witnessed. With these, the memoir wouldn’t have half of the impact. This is why it is one of the hardest books to read.