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
Nearing the end of their arduous journey, the mutual dependence was slowly dwindling as Elie began to have to take care of his father. One example of this is when his father was sick and in the camp infirmary and had not been fed so Elie “gave him what was left of [his] soup. But [his] heart was heavy. [He] was aware that [he] was doing it grudgingly,’ (107). Being that he did this grudgingly, the reader is shown that, to Elie, taking care of his father had become more of an unwanted task rather than a kind action coming from his heart. Elie begins to see his own father as a thorn in his side much rather than his source support. His father is no longer there as a person who will provide motivation to survive but now instead a burden. In another instance, still in the infirmary, when his father pleaded for water and the officer came to silence him, Elie states, “ I didn’t move.
Eliezer is very scared and his “hand tightened its grip on my (Eliezer’s) father. All I could think of was not to lose him. Not to remain alone” (30). Eliezer’s
“The weak die out and the strong will survive, and will live on forever.” That is the case for Eliezer and his father. In the concentration camps, family turns against each other. Eliezer still cherish the fact that his father is still there by his side but his father sometimes acts as a burden for him. In this point of time, Elie seems to be focusing on only himself, and he uses everything to protect himself even if it’s manipulative. I liked how the author informed the readers that life in the concentration camps is extremely overwhelming that family turns against each other. For example, it stated that Eliezer is angry at not Kapo but his
“Eliezer experiments with the possibility of becoming an adult while his father gradually slips away, all the while giving his son what space he can to let him try out a new role” (Sanderson). “Eliezer's march toward a pseudo-adulthood continues, while his father seems to be regressing. (Sanderson). Elie’s father starts to get sick and is becoming an annoyance for Elie. When Chlomo sinks into a snow bank during a forced march to the next death camp, too sick to move, Eliezer begs his father to stand up and continue moving” (Sanderson). Elie also felt no remorse for his father as he was being beaten by a S.S guard. “At first my father simply doubled the blows…I felt angry at that moment… Why couldn’t he avoid Idek’s wrath?” (Wiesel 54). Even when his father was being beaten for not marching right he still became annoyed with is dad. He also gave up his soup with a heavy heart. “I gave him what’s left of my soup.” I was aware that I did it groggily” (Wiesel
This quote explains that Eliezer’s father is a very educated, honored, and a caring man. The book shows that Eliezer’s father, as a leader of the Jewish community, acted responsibly and diligently for all his people during times even when he is going through hard times. On the first day of the concentration camp, there was an incident where he was slapped by an officer. Eliezer explains he was
The first of the 2 novels is Night, in this novel; it is often shown through-out the book that in times of need, people are willing to turn on one another. By seeing how Eliezer’s views about his father changed in the novel, it is proven that Eliezer began to focus more on surviving and desires than some of the important things like family thus proving that the evil change that Eliezer went was in fact nothing more than him falling back onto his more primitive beliefs of focusing on living by instinct and desire. The first of the two quotes to prove that is here: “He slapped my father with such force that he fell down and then crawled back to his place on all fours. I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front 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. Had I changed so much?”(Wiesel 39) This quote is from Eliezer’s first moments in Auschwitz. And from this quote, we know that it also marks the beginning of Eliezer’s steadily decreasing lack of sympathy for others for he had already began his descent to using his primitive instincts. This quote though, is extremely enlightening when compared to the thesis. This would be because this quote illustrates the fact that Eliezer
This exhibits the theme emotional death because he no longer had the light in his eyes of before. He used to teach Eliezer about God, but he no longer did once he returned from the labor camp he had been imprisoned in. He had no more emotion left inside of him, which was a drastic change for him, Moishe the
At this point I was convince Eliezer wasn’t Elie anymore. That his nickname ringed in his ears with emptiness and not a trace of sweet or aching reminiscing. He already lost his foundation at first - everything he grew up to know and everyone he grew to love. If that wasn’t enough his faith in God was stomped on and all of of his passion and love, along with nearly every other emotion, was forgotten and he could no longer remember all of the happiness he felt before. His heart was hollow. All he was now was a soulless boy who was forced to be a man too
About two-thirds of Jewish people living in Europe at the time of World War II were killed by Nazis. Elie Wiesel’s novel, Night, is about a teenage boy who was taken with his family to Auschwitz and through many of the other concentration camps. Night walks you through all the horrible and tragic events that Elie and all the other people had to endure. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses several powerful, sad, and horrifying images to demonstrate some of the horrors that occurred during the holocaust.
Wiesel also uses imagery, of Eliezer loosing the ability to express emotion, to show the dehumanization of Eliezer and the other Jews who are led to undergo drastic emotional changes. Unfortunately, the Jews suffer tremendous difficulties in the concentration camps. The torture that the enslaved Jews experience has obvious physical effects, but it also has mental changes on them. The events that have taken place at the concentration camps has shaken Eliezer so much, that at the sight of his stricken father, he replies, “My father had just been struck, before my eyes, and I had not flickered an eyelid. I had looked on and said nothing.” (Pg. 37 old book) After the Kapo beats his father to the ground for asking permission to use the bathroom, Elieizer is surprised at himself because he is incapable of doing so much as lifting a finger or saying anything in his father's defense. Like the other Jews, he is dehumanized with his main concern becoming self-preservation. Thus, Eliezer looses his compassion for others, including his father. When his father dies due to dysentery, Eliezer states, “I did not weep and it pained me that I could not weep.
Elie is watching over his father and fights for him to keep going until he no longer can. It’s in the emotional moments that they come together. “We had never understood one another so clearly.” (Weisel 65) They are seeking to understand each other and through having this emotional moment together where they are both vulnerable, they become closer than they had ever been. Without them fighting to keep one another alive they had multiple opportunities where they could’ve fallen into death. “We’ll look after each other.”(Wiesel 85) They say this while they sit in the cold both needing sleep but also knowing that falling into a deep sleep means death. When his father becomes ill Eliezer fights and begs for his father to not let go. “After my father’s death, nothing could touch me anymore.” After using so much of his energy and putting it into his father, fighting for him to stay alive he feels like nothing matters because the only thing that remained through everything was his
When Elie and his father first entered the camps, his father was struck and Elie did nothing to help his father: "What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails in this criminal's flesh" (39). This shows that, although Elie did not share a close relationship with his father, he still feels that he should stand up for his fahter for the fact that they are father and son. Elie is very violent in that he would have "dug his nails in the criminals' flesh." Evidently, Elie is furious towards the offender. Unfortunately, Elie does not do anything when his father is struck because he does not want to draw attention to himself. Nevertheless, the bond between Elie and his father does strengthen: "And what if he were dead, as well? He was not moving. Suddenly the evidence overwhelmed me: there is no longer any reason to live, any reason to fight" (98-99). Elie reveals that he truly depends on his father for survival. Because he believes his father is no longer alive, he loses all hope for surviavl. Although Elie expresses anger towards his father from time to time because he is being a burden, he still feels that his survival is meaningless without his father. The strong bond that the two developed once they entered the concentration camps proves that nothing can come between them so easily.
In life, people go through different changes when put through difficult experiences. In the book Night, Elie Wiesel is a young Jewish boy whose family is sent to a concentration camp by Nazis. The story focuses on his experiences and trials through the camp. Elie physically becomes more dehumanized and skeletal, mentally changes his perspective on religion, and socially becomes more selfish and detached, causing him to lose many parts of his character and adding to the overall theme of loss in Night.
More than once Eliezer experiences the rupture of the bond a family shares between both the
After 3 weeks at Auschwitz, they get deported to Buna, which is a turning point for the relationship between Elie and Chlomo. The camps influence Elie and give him a crooked mind focused on staying alive and nothing else. This leads to him disregarding his father. This twisted way of thinking, due to the camps, is making Elie cheer during bomb raids at Buna. He states his thoughts “But we were no longer afraid of death, at any rate, not of that death” (57). This shows that he is willing to die to see the camps destroyed. The most horrifying event that demonstrates his twisted mind is when Eliezer pays no heed to his father while he was being repeatedly beat with an iron bar. Eliezer, rather than acting indifferent and showing nothing, actually feels angry with his father. “I was angry at him for not knowing how to avoid Idek’s outbreak” (52). The new lifestyle of the camps affected Elie and his relationship with his father for the worse.