Night by Elie Wiesel

Introduction

After surviving one of the worst crimes ever committed against humanity, Elie Wiesel (b. 1928) took a 10-year vow of silence before writing about it. His book Night is one of the first and most powerful autobiographical accounts of the Holocaust ever written. Yet, after finally completing his first version of this text, he had difficulty finding a publisher for it, as most thought there would be little interest in reading about such a tragic experience. This paper discuses the themes of the book.

Themes of Night

Night began as an 862-page manuscript that was condensed to 245 pages and published in Yiddish in 1956 under the title Un Di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the world remained silent). Two years later, Wiesel translated this text into French, and his editor, Jerome Lindon, abridged the translation to 178 pages and published it as La Nuit (Night), a title the two men decided on together. Since then, Night has been read by readers around the world, being translated into more than 30 languages; it first appeared in English as a 109-page memoir in 1960. In 2006, Wiesel released a new English version of Night that corrects some small factual errors such as previously incorrect details about his age when he entered concentration camps (Fine, pp. 46).

Suffering is one of the themes of the book. Accounts of suffering as a result of human cruelty are most powerful in stories that are based in truth. This is the case in Elie Wiesel's account of the Holocaust, entitled Night. The atrocities described through Wiesel's narrator are all the more poignant because we know them to be real. The novel, which is in part a memoir, also addresses how suffering can lead to a crisis of (or loss of) faith. Suffering is a key theme in literature because it unlocks the ethical possibilities of almost any literary text. Literature nurtures the reader's ethical awareness and compassionate faculty with characters who may be quite different from the reader but inspire affinity and sympathy nonetheless (Wiesel, pp. 34).

The Existence of Evil is another theme of the book. Philosophers and religious scholars have theorized on the existence of evil for centuries, asking the question "How or why does God allow evil to exist if he is, in fact, all powerful and good. Throughout the narrative, Eliezer answers the question by asserting his God is dead (brighthubeducation.com). Another theme is oppression. Night document the oppressive experience of subjugated people living in Nazi Germany. Both of these periods are emblematic of the oppression that permeates history.

Major Theme

Elie Wiesel introduces the theme of identity in Night through his brief anecdote about Moshe the Beadle. At first, Moshe takes pride in his Jewish heritage and has strong faith in its religious tenets. Ironically, even though he holds the position of synagogue caretaker and has a deep interest in religion, he is able to make himself virtually invisible to the majority of Sighet's Jews. As a result, they find him less problematic than ...