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By far, the darkest development in the life of the author was his gradual emotional and psychological distancing that he experienced with regard to his aged father. The author is tormented by the knowledge (and memory) that he began to wish his for his father's death to relieve himself of the burden of caring for and protecting him. The author represents this through the character of Rabbi Eliahou's son who purposely allows his elderly father to fall behind him on their last death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald in the freezing snow, knowing that the consequence will be his death for failing to keep up with the group on the forced march.
The author eventually stopped responding to his father's calls and from reacting when other prisoners beat him for soiling their bunks. Ultimately, his...
Describing his reaction to father's death, he writes:
"I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched for it, I might perhaps have found something like -- free at last" (Wiesel, 38).
The theme of darkness captures more than just the plight of the European Jews; it also represents what Wiesel believed at the time to be the darkness of all of humanity and also the darkness of his own capacity for selfishness and insensitivity to his beloved father in the extreme circumstances in which he found himself as a teenage victim of the Nazi Holocaust.
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