Language of the Night “Conjure[ing] up other verbs, other images, other silent cries” (xi) Wiesel demonstrates that he has a tight grip on the concept of imagery and figurative language in his book, Night. Similes, metaphors, and personification are used the most to develop the terror of his experience and stress that it must not happen again to anyone else. The Holocaust was the mass genocide and enslavement of six million Jews and six million others who were not deemed perfect in Adolf Hitler’s eyes. Wiesel utilizes descriptive language as a way for the reader to better understand the way he was treated, the different situations he was in, and the emotions he felt during this time. A vivid mental image of the treatment of Jews in his personal
…show more content…
The first instance was how everyone thought the Germans were going to stay “distant but polite” (Wiesel 9) yet during the experience Wiesel says he “was nothing but ashes now” (68). This shows that all of the misconceptions from earlier were clearly proved wrong as more horrible acts happened each day. Broken promises made by Jews who thought the next experience would not be as bad as the first was seen as a sham by Wiesel’s “faceless neighbor” (80) in the hospital. The idea of his neighbor being faceless is figurative in that the singular man in the hospital is supposed to represent what all of the Jews are feeling about Hitler keeping his promises and that he was actually damaged physically somehow by what the Germans did to him. Wiesel goes on to describe that “it was like a page from a book, a historical novel, perhaps, dealing with the captivity in Babylon or the Spanish Inquisition” (17). Comparing ghettos to the captivity of the Jews in Babylon or the punishment of Jews in the Inquisition shows that Weisel masters relating figurative language to
The first instance was how everyone thought the Germans were going to stay “distant but polite” (Wiesel 9) yet during the experience Wiesel says he “was nothing but ashes now” (68). This shows that all of the misconceptions from earlier were clearly proved wrong as more horrible acts happened each day. Broken promises made by Jews who thought the next experience would not be as bad as the first was seen as a sham by Wiesel’s “faceless neighbor” (80) in the hospital. The idea of his neighbor being faceless is figurative in that the singular man in the hospital is supposed to represent what all of the Jews are feeling about Hitler keeping his promises and that he was actually damaged physically somehow by what the Germans did to him. Wiesel goes on to describe that “it was like a page from a book, a historical novel, perhaps, dealing with the captivity in Babylon or the Spanish Inquisition” (17). Comparing ghettos to the captivity of the Jews in Babylon or the punishment of Jews in the Inquisition shows that Weisel masters relating figurative language to