Night by Elie Wiesel

Night by Elie Wiesel

In Night, Elie Wiesel writes about his memories of life inside four different Nazi death camps with a straightforward style that some critics have referred to as journalistic. In many readers' eyes, Wiesel is more a witness to what he has seen and less a literary writer. For example, in his review of Holocaust literature in Beyond All That Fiddle, A. Alvarez charges that most of the literature that came out of the Nazi death camps lacks a certain level of imaginativeness that would make it art. "There are qualities that elude even the best [of these books], leaving them in some half-world of art," claims Alvarez. When Alvarez focuses on Night, he argues that while it is "almost unbearably painful, and certainly beyond criticism," the book is still "a failure as a work of art (Berenbaum, 65)."

Night is a very intentional book and not merely a record of what Wiesel saw. Wiesel made innumerable conscious and unconscious choices about what would remain in the slim French version of the original and what would be deleted. Wiesel has created something much more than mere reportage; through his carving and shaping of an original event, Wiesel has sculpted the story of a young boy attempting to make the journey from child to adult amid the confusion and horrors of Nazi concentration camps. The events Wiesel chooses to include--specifically, the sometimes symbolic images that illustrate Eliezer's relationship with his father and the ways in which he must pretend to be an adult--make Night much more than a chronicle. The images of Eliezer leaving childhood but ultimately failing to achieve adulthood allow the book to transcend historical documentation and elevate it into the literary realm. In fact, Wiesel uses his full first name, Eliezer, when recalling himself as a boy in the book, as if to insert some artistic distance (Berger, 369-91).

In the book, the world inside the Nazi concentration camps is a world turned upside down, a world in which nothing makes sense and nothing is as it should be. From the moment he and his family arrive at the first camp, Eliezer sees things that defy logic: children waiting to die in a fiery ditch, a son forced to help his father into a crematory oven, and a sign that taunts "Work is liberty!" Wiesel paints Eliezer's businessman father, Chlomo, as a representative of the world as it should be--logical and orderly--a counterpoint to the mayhem inside the death camps. On his journey from childhood to adulthood, Eliezer makes many efforts to resolve the tension between the orderly world outside the barbed wire and the absurd events inside the camps. These efforts demand that Eliezer become an adult to help both himself and his father survive, but in truth, Eliezer is still a child, confused and frightened at what he sees (Brown, 63).

Chlomo and Eliezer's relationship changes inside the death camps, and Wiesel selects a few scenes to highlight how they adjust to ...