To demonstrate, critic David Vanderwerken acknowledges that the most powerful of these inversions is the reversal of the relationship between father and son. According to Vanderwerken, the father will help the son make the transition from “dependence to independence” but in Night the “...roles are completely reversed; the son becomes the parent” (Vanderwerken 64). This transposal becomes extremely apparent upon Wiesel and his father’s arrival at Buchenwald. It is there that his father, already frail, completely breaks down; he speaks feverishly of things that never happened and relies more and more heavily on his son as a provider. An example of this would be when Wiesel discovers his father in his bed, crying that his neighbors were beating
