"Unconditional faith in an all-powerful-all-merciful God is shaken to the core by the ubiquitous brutality of the concentration camps."
In the memoir, Night, as the young narrator, Eliezer, struggles for survival amidst the horrors of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, the author, grapples with the question of how an oppressive environment can affect an individual’s faith and ethics. Mainly through the use of night as a motif and imagery of light and darkness, Wiesel captures the power of cruelty in corroding faith in mankind and general goodness of the world. As Eliezer’s initial unconditional faith in an all-powerful-all-merciful God is shaken to the core by the ubiquitous brutality of the concentration camps, the resultant disillusionment can be seen as negative bildungsroman.
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| Elie Wiesel the author and the book jacket |
The anaphoric “Never shall I forget” not only establishes a sombre mood, but also serves to illuminate the use of night as a significant motif throughout the memoir. The harrowing, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night …” (45), encapsulates the symbolic darkness occasioned by the oppressiveness of the Holocaust. The silence of the night, one would hope, would bring with it the respite much needed by Eliezer and his fellow prisoners, but it instead causes unbound anguish as Eliezer takes it to be symbolic of a God negligent of his people in their hour of need. Through a series of rhetorical questions and diction that portrays rebellion, Eliezer’s shifting faith in God comes to the fore:
