Midway Review: Night

            One of the first things about Night that really struck me was how fast the story moves.  Elie Wiesel doesn’t waste his time or the reader’s time with unnecessary and superfluous information.  He employs the power of short sentences, which help to drive his points home in a concise, blunt fashion.  Wiesel’s style and tone clearly conveys the urgency of the story he is sharing.  He lived through the Holocaust.  And he never wants it to happen again.

            One of the topics that I was curious about before reading Night was how Wiesel would talk about his relationship with God.  Pretty much from the start he talks about his devotion to studying Jewish texts and making his faith and religion an integral part of his life.  That changes very quickly.  But not as fast as I would have assumed.  Even when other countries are invaded, even when an escapee who ran from the Nazis warns him, even when he is forced to live in a ghetto, Elie remains optimistic and loyal to God.  This plays into a really jagged story arc.  It is really jagged, marked with high points of hope and low points of reality.  So far, I do think the general slope of the story is moving down, as Wiesel begins to question the veracity of God and the internal motivators that turn fellow humans into murderers.

            After being wrenched from his home and seeing horrible sights (like children and babies being slaughtered left and right) however, his mindset almost immediately switches.  Wiesel shares that he will never “forget those flames which consumed my faith forever” (32).  The flames are both literal and figurative, and they are tantalizingly harsh.  I predict that light/flames will be used as a motif throughout the novel to illustrate hope, extinguished innocence, and the searing grip of reality.  Thus, the same light may be used in a positive and negative way, and I think this reflects a larger theme in this story: how to distinguish between good and evil, what for one person may be golden and another shattered.

            Wiesel also shares that he “did not deny God’s existence, but [he] doubted His absolute justice” (42).  He no longer tried to find the silver lining in his struggle to connect with God, and I think this is a powerful message.  Some things truly are unbearably painful, and it is not the responsibility of those who suffer to make things better, but rather, it is the duty of those who survive to never let that struggle be reborn.  Wiesel made the incredible leap from keeping the darkest part of his life locked away to sharing it with the world, and I am looking forward to finishing Night and seeing how Wiesel makes the world a better place.