Innocence In Night By Elie Wiesel

Ellie Wiesel once said, "For I belong to a traumatized generation, one that experienced the abandonment and solitude of our people." The Holocaust left the Jewish people in a hysterical state of extreme self-preservation and desertion by the outside world. These overwrought emotions in Night recount the experiences of Elie Wiesel and his family while being imprisoned in concentration camps during World War II. Within the walls, Ellie is forced to work in deficient conditions while the outside world continues to live in ignorance about the existence of these camps. As Elie grows older, he becomes exposed to unimaginable circumstances where he becomes oblivious to the loss of his innocence. Toward the end of his imprisonment, a heartbreaking …show more content…
Elie 's father is the ultimate source of his motivation and he impels Elie to never give up on his will to survive. However, his father soon falls extremely ill and passes away while Elie is asleep. Elie expresses the solitude and misery he feels after his father is gone when he says, "I shall not describe my life during that period. It no longer mattered. Since my father 's death, nothing mattered to me anymore... I spent my days in total idleness" (113). Elie 's indifferent and dormant attitude reveals that he feels a sense of emptiness once his motivation disappears, forcing him into a vacant void within his body. His father 's death drains him and consumes the last of his innocence; Elie no longer feels that it is necessary to function and once he is liberated, he finds it difficult to adjust to life without his inspiration. Elie is liberated soon after his father 's slow, agonizing death and is sent to a hospital to recover from a related sickness; Elie decides to look at himself because he was unable to look at his appearance while in the concentration camp: "One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me never left me" (115). The 'corpse ' looking back at Elie is a metaphor for his nonexistent innocence; It is dead. The corpse tells of the demented and sickening experiences he is exposed to and alleviates his childhood innocence. Elie suffers through the death of his father and no longer contains the innocence he had before his life at the twisted concentration