Hope In Elie Wiesel's Night

The struggle to maintain hope is often an unavoidable effect of war. Elie Wiesel incorporates this theme in his novel Night by writing,” One more stab to the heart, one more reason to hate, one less reason to live.”(Wiesel 66) Elie’s quote defines the theme of struggling to keep your head up, and the struggle to have hope. When Elie says,” One less reason to live...” he is explaining that after the events that occurred in the past, or during the war show how those events affect war heroes and give a reason to lose hope. Not to mention, multiple soldiers have come back from wars and other countries traumatized, or with PTSD, which is post-traumatic stress disorder. However, the quotes and examples given support the theme that during every …show more content…
During the time of this war, several events were occurring in the background. With this in mind, there is a specific key event that occurred during WWII, which was the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a mass murder in which Adolf Hitler and his followers killed around 6 million Jews. The novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, was set during WWII and also explained the holocaust and the events that take place during the war. In his novel, Wiesel wrote a quote that expresses,”I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.” (Wiesel 109). This quote was from the end of the book and shows trauma, sadness and loss of hope. When A-7713 says,” The look in his eyes, as they stared into me, has never left me.” Shows that it traumatized him from seeing himself look so different then when A-7713 was living in the ghetto. Even though A-7713 had made it through the terrible holocaust, in the end he realized that had been a part of his life and it would stick with him forever. In addition to that, he also became aware that he had lost hope along the way because of the procedures that had happened to him. With that being said Wiesel also included this quote into his novel,” What are you, my God? I thought angrily. How do you compare to this …show more content…
The Vietnam War was one of the most tragic wars in the 20th century. A man by the name of Michael Burgan wrote a book called The Vietnam War. This book has series of tales and stories in it containing information that happened during the war. A soldier named Jack Smith wrote a letter that explained how preparation for the war was nearly impossible, and supported that within this quote,” Nothing prepares you for combat. The best way to prepare a company for combat is to line the company up against the wall and fire a machine-gun at them for about two seconds”(Smith 19). This quote is written to give some inside as to what the war was like, secondly how there was no way the soldiers could get ready for the war, because you did not know what would happen during the time of battle. If you fire a machine-gun at a line of soldiers with nowhere to run or hide, the bullets will hit some of the soldiers. So by saying that, that gives the soldiers little hope for survival in the war because they could get killed any minute. Smith is saying that war is like a game of chance, if the opposite side shoots and misses one soldier, the bullet could hit another soldier. Therefore it was easy for soldiers to lose hope before they even go into battle. One more example that Smith wrote was,” They all had these thousand yard stares that people talk about. The stare of someone who is nineteen years old but going on fifty,