Wyatt Smith
Pre Ap English 6th
Assignment: Stylistic Analysis of Elie Wiesel’s Memoir, Night
A Night to Remember
In Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, Wiesel exemplifies a night and day change from innocent, religious twelve year old in Sighet, to a fifteen year old walking corpse out of concentration camps. By using literary devices such as dialogue between characters and the use of sentence structures and rhetorical questions, Wiesel expresses his change from Chapters 1-5 to 6-9.
As the only main characters to survive for most of Wiesel’s Holocaust experience, Wiesel’s father son dialogue is a constant marker of how Papa and Wiesel feel about each other, the Nazis, and God. Wiesel’s father dryly describes Elie’s religious feelings, “You are too young for that. Maimonides tells us that one must be thirty before venturing into the world of mysticism, a world fraught with peril. First you must study the basic subjects, those you are able to comprehend.”(4) Wiesel shows that in normal Sighet life, his father acts nonchalantly about his family, and doesn’t consider Elie very mature, because he doesn’t spend enough time with him to know Elie is very involved with the Jewish religion. Papa also shows priority to the townspeople than his own four children, which has a lasting effect on his soul as he watches almost his whole family taken to the crematorium. However, when Papa and Elie’s community shifts from Sighet too Auschwitz, Papa rethinks who is most important in his life. During the march to Gleiwitz, even understands the influence his life has on his father’s, stating, “My father’s presence was the only thing that stopped me. He was running next to me, out of breath, out of strenght, desperate. I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his sole support.”(86-87) This perseverance found within Wiesel’s internal dialogue contrasts from early dialogue about Wiesel’s fathers involvement with others compared to his own family. Papa now cares exclusively for his son, having lost his three daughters and wife. and Elie knows that when he dies, his father will die as well. Likewise, an experience where Papa talks to Elie concerning death is when Papa is chosen for selection and he tries to give Elie the best chance he can to live, pleading, “Here, take this knife. ‘he said.’ “I won’t need it anymore. You may find it useful. Also take this spoon. Don’t sell it. Quickly! Go ahead, take what I’m giving you!” ‘My inheritance…’ “Don’t talk like Father.” ‘I was on the verge of breaking into sobs.’ “I don’t want you to say such things. Keep the spoon and the knife. You will need them as much as I. We’ll see each other tonight, after work.”(75) This excerpt not only shows how anxious Papa is about dying, but how much Wiesel wants his father to keep hope and survive. Wiesel also shows that he has been leaning on his father for survival, and at a place as horrible as concentration camp, losing his father would make it much harder to live, being a teenage boy especially. In contrast, in the passage where Papa is being screamed at by Elie to get out of the snow and save his own life, Papa weakly replies,”Don’t yell, my son. Have pity on your old father… Let me rest here… A little… I beg of you, I’m so tired… No more strength…”(105) Wiesel shows that earlier in camp life, death seemed to scare his father, causing anxiety, but later his father begs Elie to leave him and let him sleep under the warm blanket of a snowy grave. Overall, Wiesel shows the change in dialogue from his fathers feeling of wantin to die, and Papa’s change from being more involved with others to only caring of Elie, or dying.
Wiesel also uses sentence structure to convey his state of energy and hopefulness of his mind. For example, when all the Jews of Sighet still have reasonable amounts of hope, Wiesel more commonly uses compound, complex, and compound complex sentences, such as, “And thus my elders concerned themselves with all manner of things- strategy, diplomacy, politics, and Zionism- but not with their own fate.”(8) This passage is explained by Wiesel elegantly, offering his vivid recollection of the fancy and politically correct approach used by his elders to handle the threat of Nazis, instead of fleeing the area. In contrast, later in Wiesel’s life, when he is forced to live in the children’s block in Buchenwald, after his father’s death, Wiesel describes his feelings of pain, “I shall not talk about my life during that period. It no longer mattered. Since my fathers death, nothing mattered to me anymore.”(113) This passage, by using short sentences combined, showing the struggle it takes in Wiesels mind to write about this horrible time, portrays the changes in not just Wiesel’s life during the Holocaust, but with all Jews that are inprisoned. Jews in Sighet go from not worrying about the Nazis to being annihilated by them. This passage exemplifies that Jews were forced to lose their families, faith in God, and their hope in life during the Holocaust. Another example of Wiesel using longer, more complex sentences is when the Jews of Sighet are forced to march past Wiesel, “one after the other, my teachers, my friends, the others, some of whom I had once feared, some of whom I found ridiculous, all those whose lives I had shared for years.”(17) The fact that Wiesel uses great detail to describe the Jewish passerbys shows that even though Jews are in a troublesome time, they still have a unique sense of humanity left. In contrast, while describing Jews and fellow prisoners after the march when all survivors are instructed to take a shower, Wiesel refers to himself and his group as, “We had been ordered to go outside to allow for cleaning of the blocks.”(107) Wiesel, instead of individually assessing Jews, like he did earlier, he collectively assorts Jews as a group of living corpses. This differs from the first quote because of thinking of each Jew personally through characteristics, Wiesel describes Jews as one group with the same exact problem. Wiesel also uses rhetorical questions to show how hard it is to reflect back on his times with family, knowing that they went to the crematorium and died. Wiesel shows this problem in Sighet when he hears, “The yellow star, what about it? It’s not lethal! (Poor Father! Of what then did you die?”)(11) Wisel using his older perspective to view and write this book, can’t help but intervene, giving away that his father dies, and showing his sadness to write this book and willingness to go back and flee when they had the chance. Likewise, Wiesel shows indifference of Jews by asking, “Our minds numb with indifference. Here or elsewhere, what did it matter? Die today or tomorrow, or later?”(98) This compares to the first quote because both of them are about the dire situation of death Jews are in. They also both have insight from the perspective of the older Elie, who knows that almost all Jews he is with will end up dying.
Wiesel uses these literary devices to show the transformation in Elies attitude and actions from the first five chapters to the last three. From dialogue, Wiesel and his father show that death doesn’t seem very bad after going through an extended period of concentration camp. By using varied sentence structures, Wiesel shows his deteriorating spirit after his faith is stripped away. Finally, by using rhetorical questions, Wiesel also shows his pain in writing this story from his older self, and also uses rhetorical question to wonder why he has to go through all of this pain.