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Emotional Death Theme In Night By Elie Wiesel

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Night by Elie Wiesel develops many themes such as: emotional death, the struggle to maintain faith, and self-preservation versus family commitment. Night is a story of a young Jewish boy, Elie, sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War. Elie is the narrator of the story. Throughout the story, Elie experiences many experiences that will haunt him eternally. Wiesel writes about Elie’s horrendous experiences, feelings, and thoughts at Auschwitz. The themes emotional death, the struggle to maintain faith, and self-preservation versus family commitment are prevalent in Elie’s story of perseverance and triumph despite hard circumstances. One of the themes in Night is emotional death. There are many examples of emotional death because Elie began to shut down emotionally as the …show more content…

At one point in Elie’s story, his dad is beaten by a Gypsy inmate in charge of the barrack Elie and his father are staying in. Elie recounts “I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in from of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh!” (39). Another example of the theme of emotional death is when Elie and other prisoners are being shipped on a train to a new place. People are dying while on the train. Every once in a while, the train will stop and authority figures will collect the dead from the train cars. Elie says “It never stopped snowing. We remained lying on the floor for days and nights, one on top of the other, never uttering a word. We were nothing but frozen bodies. Our eyes closed, we merely waited for the next stop, to unload our dead” (100). A third and final example of emotional death found in the book

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