Night Essay Example: Examples of Night

“I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.” (42) Elie Wiesel’s Night is about a young Jewish boy and his experiences through the Holocaust in the 1940’s. Any human being should never experience the hell-like terror that Elie had to go through. He is separated from his mother and his sister and is deported to Auschwitz, one of Hitler’s most depressing concentration camps. Wiesel uses night not only as the title but also as a symbol of time, a world without God, and man’s inhumanity to man. Night is defined as a time of day when the sun is dormant, but for Elie Wiesel, night is eternal. While stuck inside the camp, hope is quickly diminished in Elie’s mind, overtaken by the deep darkness that night brings. This can be clearly seen when Ellie explains his last night in Buna. “Yet another last night. The last night at home, the last night in the ghetto, the last night in the train, and, now the last night in Buna. How much longer were our lives to be dragged out from one ‘last night’ to another?”(79) The question that Elie repeats shows that light in the camp can be seen as sign of hope, but sadly no light shines in the gloomy, depressing place. Elie explains how he encounters a complete darkness, no matter what time of day it is, when he enters Auschwitz. “Never shall I forget the night, the first night in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night.”(32) The horrid sights he has to live through in the camp can be seen as the scary, evil, eerie feeling that you get when nightfall arrives, almost like a time of day were there is no presence of God. When forced to evacuate the camp, Elie explains how the darkness swallowed people’s lives as they were marched to death. “Pitch darkness. Every now and then, an explosion in the night. They had orders to fire on any who could not keep up.”(81) With the sound of gunshots and people dying, night hovered over every single one of them marching for their own lives. The gloomy, dark, fright-filled