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Examples Of Emotion In Night By Elie Wiesel

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Faded Emotions While conscious of cruelty all around, fifteen-year-old Eliezer Wiesel changes from an innocent boy to a brutal being. In the novel Night by Eliezer Wiesel, Wiesel recalls his tragic experiences as a Jew during the Holocaust. Eliezer enters the camp as an innocent boy, strong in his faith but develops into someone he does not even recognize. Young Eliezer becomes cruel, detached, and emotionless through his experiences in concentration camps. Eliezer falls into cruelty when he allows his father to be beaten. “I had watched the whole scene without moving. I kept quiet. In fact I was thinking of how to get farther away so that I would not be hit myself. What is more, any anger I felt at that moment was directed, not against …show more content…

He especially turns emotionless towards his dying father. “The officer came up to him and shouted at him to be quiet. But my father did not hear him. He went on calling me. The officer dealt him a violent blow on the head with his truncheon. I did not move. I was afraid. My body was afraid of also receiving a blow” (Wiesel 81). Eliezer’s father is on his death bed and calls Eliezer to help him. Instead of heeding to his father’s desperate cry, Eliezer chooses to ignore him. In fact, he allows the soldiers to harm his father even further. This is a prime example of how Eliezer has become emotionless because if he cared in the slightest way, he would have come to his father’s rescue. After his father actually dies while calling Eliezer’s name, Eliezer’s emotions completely dissipate. “I did not weep. But I had no more tears! And, in the depths of my being, on the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like---free at last!” (Wiesel 81). Eliezer cannot even dig into the depths of his now brutal being to find tears to cry for his father. He is actually relieved that his father is deceased because he now views himself as free. This point is actually ironic because Eliezer previously prayed that he would never abandon his father, but he ends up doing exactly that. Therefore, it is evident that Eliezer’s emotions have vanished as he distances himself from his

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