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Suffering In Elie Wiesel's Night

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Millions of Jews perished in the persecution by the Germans during the atrocity of the Holocaust, with only a fraction of the population fortunate enough to survive through the brutal concentration camps that the Nazi Regime forced them to undergo. In such a barbarous time in history, the preservation of strong faith is what people thought would help them to endure through the dark times and give them hope. However, it was nearly impossible to trust God and His plan when the ground around the prisoners assumed the role of a graveyard and the living struggled to survive through the night. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust and prisoner of multiple concentration camps in Europe, wrote the memoir Night about his unimaginable suffering during …show more content…
Wiesel utilizes repetition of the word “I” to show that his anger due to his belief that God was no longer with him led to him feeling completely alone (Wiesel 68). This contrasted to his typical plural pronouns that he usually used, which helps to single him out among everyone else in order to accentuate his own personal feelings of being abandoned, which made him want to give up hope in believing in God. Wiesel even uses the word “congregation” in Night to highlight the irony of being surrounded by people for religious worship, while he feels completely isolated due to his own doubt in God (Wiesel 68). Although he’s physically surrounded in a room full of other people, he feels mentally alone since he is losing faith in God. A congregation allows people to religiously connect and praise with others that have the same belief as themselves. However, he didn’t feel connected to them through faith at all because he was losing his faith. Wiesel uses the word “midst,” to set a suspenseful mood through the lack of clarity, which emphasizes his confusion about whether or not he still had any faith left (Wiesel 68). The illustration of obscurity portrays his uncertainty in religion that was rooted in the inhumane circumstances he suffered through to depict the loneliness he felt without God’s presence. The shift in tone from angry to lonely is also presented through an abrupt change of punchy, direct syntax to more abstract flowery language in alternate paragraphs. His request for mercy is displayed in the eloquent complex sentences, which exemplifies the sorrow he now feels because he is all alone since he doesn’t believe God is on his side. Elie exhibits his self reflection, which highlights his loneliness, in order to show that

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