A common theme in Elie Wiesel’s Night is loss of faith. Many times while Elie is in the concentration camp, he finds himself and other Jews losing faith: “Where is merciful God, where is He?” (64) Some Jews were torn between believing that God would help and not. In some parts of the book Elie was saying the Jewish prayer, Kaddish, which is a prayer for mourning and thanking God, and in other parts, he is being stripped of his faith.
In another part in the book, when Elie recites his subparagraph that begins with, “Never shall I forget…” Elie says that he will never forget, “the moments that murdered my god and my soul, and turned my dreams to ashes.” (34) Auschwitz and the other camps have done so much torture to Wiesel, that he doesn’t believe God can help him any more. Without faith, the only thing that keeps him in line is his father.
The way Wiesel writes his memoir is almost like it’s written in prose, he is extremely descriptive with his writing, and his sentences flow, but he keeps the plot fast-paced and moving like the greatest poems are. There was one part I read that almost brought me to tears: the uncertainty of it, the questions it left, and the horrifying thought that it was pure hope that was keeping these people alive when there truly was nothing to hope for. “Take care of your son. He is very weak, very dehydrated. Take care of yourselves, you must avoid selections. Eat! Anything. Anytime. Eat all you can. The weak don’t last very long around here”… And he himself was so thin, so withered, so weak… “The only thing that keeps me alive,” he kept saying, “is to know that Reizel and the little ones are still alive. Were it not for them, I would give up.” One evening, he came to see us, his face radiant. “A transport just arrived from Antwerp. I shall go to see them tomorrow. Surely they will hav...
Jack,
ReplyDeleteThis theme of loss and gain of faith is one that I found very common in the novel as well. I hadn't even noticed these examples until reading your blog post, and they were very interesting examples.
Jack,
ReplyDeleteThe loss of faith is very prominent throughout the memoir (I wrote about it myself in my blog post), but I felt as though I was experiencing the whole concept for the first time in your example of the "Never shall I forget..." poem. I didn't even notice the part when Elie speaks of the moments that took away his faith when I first read it. It is very compelling and powerful.