Say More With Less: Night, By Eliezer Wiesel

Say More with Less “Night” by Eliezer Wiesel is a powerful novel, yet it received backlash for not going into detail about the Jew’s horrific experiences while at concentration camps. Critics say that the material could have been even more graphic than it already was in order to display the true horrors the Jews experienced. Because he chose to relay his experiences in an understated manner, Wiesel is actually showing his readers just how gut wrenching that event really was. When a person experiences a tragedy, the last thing they want to do is revisit it. Therefore, when Wiesel writes, he does it not from the perspective of someone viewing it full on, but rather in short glimpses. For example, he does not say that he sees one of the SS officers
shoot a prisoner, instead he says, “Behind me an old man fell to the ground. Near him an SS man, putting his revolver back in his holster.” This was Wiesel’s was of removing himself from the the cruelty of the situation while still making it obvious to reader the tragedy that just happened. Another reason for this was to remind readers of his innocence. He was only a child when the holocaust took place and wouldn’t have tried to remember every detail of every excruciating moment. An example of this is in chapter seven when a loaf of bread is thrown in the train and then men start savagely fighting each other for the stale loaf. One man eventually gets it and his own son kills him of the bread, but only a few moments later that son is killed by another passenger for the same loaf of bread. When the scene comes to a close our narrator makes this statement, “...next to me were two corpses, side by side, a father and a son. I was fifteen.” He takes the time after this gruesome scene to remind the reader that he was only a teenager when this took place. Eliezer Wiesel said more about the holocaust in what he didn’t say. His lack of details only proved to the audience that what happened was truly unfathomable. Instead of giving his readers a play by play of each murder he encountered, he would give one detail, like the the aftermath. Another reason for his brevity was because he was only a child at the time. Wiesel was only a boy and this event definitely had a negative impact on not only his childhood but also his entire life. The experiences he had were unimaginable, and he chose understatements to keep it that way.