Night By Elie Wiesel Analysis

Without a method as a metaphorical or physical cocaine to numb one’s pain, out of pure empathy, those who suffer would suffer more when they witness the same reflected in their surroundings. However, reactions to suffering are not a complete black-white: there voiced a third path in the memoir novel Night (1958), wherein the author, Elie Wiesel, recounts how he coped through his own “cocaine” he developed to numb the abuse he was reluctantly pushed through in a concentration camp of Nazi Germany during the peak of the Holocaust: displacement. The mental displacement he made from his surroundings of sorrow he described with their eyes may have been the key to how he survived and never emotionally broke anymore after he developed it, but as one …show more content…
The trauma he underwent is expressed through the contrast of his “dreamy eyes gazing off into the distance” (3) in the introduction, to the dullness of his spirit when “The joy in his eyes was gone” (7) after he escaped from the clutches of the Nazis undergoing a murder spree of foreign Jews in their area. Gone was the mysticism, replaced by cold, hard reality. Elie witnesses the horrifying change, yet does not budge, coping through denial of Moishe’s warning that more people will be killed by claiming in his mind that everything is still normal. As the first chapter progresses and more strict, oppressing regulations are placed, Elie and his neighbors still cope by mentally reverting things back to normal. This cycle of pain to normality continues until everyone in the ghetto is painfully forced into trains to an at-the-time unknown location. He only knows normality is self-constructed when he looks into their eyes, for at this point, Elie feels the pain for his peers, yet has not yet befriended Displacement. However, as living conditions become worse, especially marked by the scorching of Birkenau concentration camp, he would develop the less empathetic mode for