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WATCH
Elie Wiesel's dramatic monologue lets the reader see him as the young Jewish boy in a Hungarian village and as a mature man who revisits that past, in memory and in fact. The narrative is especially poignant as it begins just after Wiesel's bar mitzvah, the formal declaration of his entry into manhood -- the time when he assumed all the responsibilities that adulthood can press up a thirteen-year-old boy. From that jubilant ceremony, Wiesel is plunged into unimaginable horror. The link between Wiesel's two lives is a gold watch that he received in honor of his successful transition into adulthood. Yet the young man is no more able to protect his family from the Holocaust than were his elders. Their collective wisdom -- developed over a lifetime of being Jewish in a land where their religion was a liability and the practice of their religion was a death sentence -- was insufficient to grant the foresight and feed the resolve to abandon their homeland.
The references to the watch as a past life, or a life that is passing by, use both metonymy and symbolism. The use of watch is metonymy, in that, the watch maintains a vigil when Wiesel...
The watch, as material things so often do, survives the family and a way of life. And when Wiesel returns to his native place, the watch is there to greet him -- it, too, as a survivor. Wiesel's gold watch is symbolic of the treasure that a young man is to his family and community, of the life he forcibly left behind, and the passage of time during which Wiesel lived apart from his home. The watch, in Wiesel's words, offered the promise of "an epilogue" to his childhood. He could not dig out the earth the closure that he sought. The elapsed time could not be recaptured, nor could the course of events be changed any more than turning back the clock brings anything more than a virtual time -- not a time that was, but a representation of a time that had already passed. The effort of digging up the watch with his unprotected hands, using his fingers instead of tools, is symbolic of his survival of the Holocaust. He survived by chance and because he was hardy, resilient, and determined. With the same mindset, Wiesel attacks the earth to take back what was stolen from him -- his watch and the normal life he anticipated. It is ironic that Wiesel…
This is why he fled his adoptive parents' home, and confidently volunteered to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. Because he believed he had the ability to outwit fate he confidently issued a proclamation to Thebes, telling the suffering citizens he would be sure to punish whomever was the cause of the plague -- and unwittingly condemning himself. But in "Oedipus at Colonus," Oedipus is a humbled man. He
"And we, the Jews of Sighet, were waiting for better days, which would not be long in coming now." (Night 5) Even as they were taken to death camps, many Jewish individuals continues to believe that God was with them and that they needed to act in agreement with his plan, despite the fact that it involved them having to suffer. While Wiesel started to doubt God's plan, he continued
In "A Story of an Hour" the protagonist must confront the idea that for her to live, her husband and her conventional, protected domestic existence must die. What has been really killing her is not her weak heart, but her entrapment in misery, and when she is returned to the prison of her misery, she expires -- not of joy, but of the shock that she cannot escape. The
.. We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department -- a whole government machinery. Everyone marveled at it. We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares" (Wiesel, p9). Chances of surviving the camps depended largely on whether one was deported to a work camp or a death camp and whether one was of sufficient age
Because Elie Wiesel's Night provides one of the most graphic and intimate accounts of the horrors of the holocaust and the effect it has on the human psyche, it serves as the best primary source that can be used to teaching the Holocaust to a secondary level high school classroom. Not only is it an essential book to read, it serves to move the curriculum forward in teaching students how
The prize is not awarded every year, since 1901 there have been 19 years in which it was determined that no candidate fit the criteria. However, in 1986 Wiesel received the prize because of his continual work towards reminding humanity that violence, repression and racism have no place in the modern world. Since 1958, and the publication of Night, Wiesel continued to write, lecture, and advocate a continual "message