Elie Weisel's Night: Contrasting Elie And His Father
In Elie Weisel's autobiographical book Night (1960), an account of how Elie and his entire family were taken by the Nazis to concentration camps during World War II, Elie emerges as a much different person from his father. Elie's father is a leader of his community before the Holocaust, and as such, he often seems more concerned about his community than even his family or himself. Elie, on the other hand, is more of a pragmatist, especially as the story progresses, and Elie, along with his father, must survive Auschwitz together, and then the Death March to Buchenwald. (Elie's father survives the death march, just barely, but then dies shortly after they reach Buchenwald). In this essay, I will compare and contrast Elie and his father, as Elie Weisel describes them both within Night.
Early in Night, Elie Weisel, who is an adolescent at the time the story takes place, describes his father in the following way:
My father was a cultured, rather unsentimental man. There was never any display of emotion, even at home. He was more concerned with others than with his own family. The Jewish community in Sighet held him in the greatest esteem. They often used to consult him about public matters and even about private ones. (Night, p. 2).
Elie himself, at least at the beginning of Night, seems to be on his way to becoming someone studious and cultured, like his father. As Weisel recalls: "I was twelve. I believed profoundly. During the day I studied the Talmud, and at night I ran to...
This is why he fled his adoptive parents' home, and confidently volunteered to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. Because he believed he had the ability to outwit fate he confidently issued a proclamation to Thebes, telling the suffering citizens he would be sure to punish whomever was the cause of the plague -- and unwittingly condemning himself. But in "Oedipus at Colonus," Oedipus is a humbled man. He
"And we, the Jews of Sighet, were waiting for better days, which would not be long in coming now." (Night 5) Even as they were taken to death camps, many Jewish individuals continues to believe that God was with them and that they needed to act in agreement with his plan, despite the fact that it involved them having to suffer. While Wiesel started to doubt God's plan, he continued
In this case, Wiesel attempted to trust God the way his mentor and the other religious villagers did, but each family was moved and deported. Moshe the Beadle escaped just to be labeled a lunatic, and the hope in God proved futile. In such circumstances, the most faithful of people would remind themselves to take joy in suffering for their faiths, to remind themselves that the Bible gives instructions
.. We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department -- a whole government machinery. Everyone marveled at it. We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares" (Wiesel, p9). Chances of surviving the camps depended largely on whether one was deported to a work camp or a death camp and whether one was of sufficient age
We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares" (Wiesel, 9). By far, the darkest development in the life of the author was his gradual emotional and psychological distancing that he experienced with regard to his aged father. The author is tormented by the knowledge (and memory) that he began to wish his for his father's death to relieve himself of the burden of caring
This apathetic sentiment even envelops the narrator, as the following quotation demonstrates by showing that Eliezer knew that "the child was still alive when I passed him." Despite this fact, the narrator does nothing to help the child due to his extreme apathy. However, the narrator's apathy is proven most effectively by his silent answer to the question as to God's presence, which the subsequent quotation suggests. "Where is
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