Night by Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel

Response: Night

In some ways, it is comforting when the world obeys a moral logic, even when it hurts us. We don't wear knee pads while roller blading, and scab our knees. What is frightening is when we do everything right, and life is proceeding along an ordinary track, and suddenly tragedy befalls us. While anti-Semitism had been a presence in Europe as long as Wiesel could remember, the level of tragedy of the Holocaust that swept Wiesel from his community and family was like a natural disaster, like a fire or a flood in its intensity -- but this disaster was created and inflicted by the hands of human beings. This compounded the sense of absurdity -- Wiesel had done nothing but exist, done nothing to justify his punishment other than being Jewish, and suddenly, he was being punished and had to confront utter annihilation. This is also why Wiesel's experiences cause him to doubt God -- not because bad things had happened, but because there was no logic to the tragedy and to who survived and who lived.

Response: Feminism

Sometimes, for women to be artistically fruitful and to live fulfilling lives, it is necessary for women to be selfish. To be a writer and to have a room of one's own, a woman must sometimes shut the door to the needs of her family. 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 contemplation of her husband's death also is a kind of shock, as it forces her to radically reconsider her life and her sense of identity in a way that would never have occurred, if she had not believed him to be dead.