Figurative Language In Night By Elie Wiesel

There is an abundance of figurative language in Night, written by Elie Wiesel. He uses a lot of very complicated figurative language to express certain images or feelings, often making his words like a puzzle that one needs to solve in order to understand its meaning. There are three particularly meaningful uses of figurative language throughout the novel, and that show Elie Wiesel’s creativity and amazing writing skill. The first use of figurative language that really stood out to me was when Elie Wiesel used a metaphor to compare the situation in which the Jews were to a sword hanging over their heads. In the text, Elie, his father, and others from his town had just arrived in the first concentration camp and were taking in the horrifying …show more content…
Elie’s father was dying in the snow, not willing to get up to warm himself. “This discussion continued for some time. I knew that I was no longer arguing with him but with Death itself, with Death that he had already chosen,” (page 105). This gives a the reader an awful mood, a feeling of solemn and grief. At this point the reader understands that Elie’s father is gone, and he would not return to the man he used to be. He had been way to mentally and physically tortured to stay alive. He himself no longer believed he could survive, he just wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. When Elie writes that he was arguing with death rather than his father, he means that death had overtaken him and was fighting with Elie. Elie’s father had given up on his will to live and didn’t even care that his son desperately needed him to stay alive so that he could continue on. The reader at this moment in the book understands that the Holocaust makes humans inhuman. It dehumanizes them and destroys the people that used to be. Elie included this to show the drastic impact that an experience like this has on a