5/20/2023 0 Comments Night book![]() It is one of the first ways that young people learn about the Holocaust. It is read in middle schools, high schools, and universities around the world, providing students with an insight into the horrors of the Second World War as they were experienced by someone close to their own age. Today, Night is commonly considered to be one of the best personal accounts of the Holocaust ever written. Some other award-winning novels include The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, about a German girl whose foster family hides a Jewish boy, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne, which depicts Auschwitz from the perspective of a young boy whose father is the Commandant of the camp. ![]() Some other novels that should also be considered when thinking about Night are the two others in the trilogy, Dawn and Day. These two novels follow new characters who deal with their own experiences after WWII. Night by Elie Wiesel Visual Representation When Eliezer’s father, Shlomo, dies, and Eliezer experiences freedom from the burden of his father’s care, Wiesel represents the true breadth of the changes he’d undergone in the camps and the desperate state to which he and others were existing in. Or, more specifically, sons and their treatment of their fathers. The climax of the novel connects intimately to one of the most important but often overlooked themes in Night, that of father/son relationships. The novel was written several years after WWII, from the perspective of a thirty-year-old man, looking back on himself as a young adult. Night is incredibly personal, so much so that its language only gives the reader so much access to a time in Wiesel’s life that anyone would want to forget, but which he knew was too important to keep in his past. Wiesel spends its brief 100 pages depicting the lead up to the ghettos, trains, and camps, the loss of his family members, including his mother and sister, and then later his father as well, his suffering (and the suffering he observed) and finally his liberation. Wiesel has spoken about Night as his account of what happened in the concentration camps, one that is set back only slightly from reality through the creation of Eliezer and a few changes of events and circumstances. Unlike some novels that are written at a distance, Night is tied up with the author’s life in an intimate, unignorable way. Antagonist: The SS soldiers and broader anti-Jewish laws and sentiment.Climax: the death of Eliezer’s father, Shlomo.Genre: Memoir/Semi-fictional autobiography.When/where written: 1955-1958, South America and France.The novel is an important historical memoir published in 1960. It was not until the trial and execution of Adolf Eichman in 1961, a year after the novel was finally published, that it came fully into the public spotlight.
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