Sacrifice Wiesel: A Literary Analysis

One such ironic instance would be when the Jews are traveling to Birkenau, and one woman, Mrs. Schächter, has multiple outbursts about her hallucination of a abhorrent fire. At first, the Jews believed her, but after seeing no fire and later experiencing numerous explosions of the same kind, they assumed that she had gone insane, much like Moishe the Beadle. Rather than deal with her nonsense, the Jews tied up and gagged Mrs. Schächter, and her random frenzies ceased. However, just as the Jews arrived in Birkenau and had almost forgotten her existence, Mrs. Schächter’s anxious cries filled up the train car once again. However, this time, the cries spoke the truth, and in front of the awestruck Jews were “Flames rising from a tall chimney into a black sky” (Wiesel 28). Through the usage of the term “tall”, Wiesel shows that the ghastly flames that Mrs. Schächter had envisioned were actually from the crematorium. This situation would be categorized as dramatic irony, for two reasons. …show more content…
Schächter was foreseeing beforehand, and secondly, the fact that the previous outbursts are used to accentuate the appearance of the actual fire validates this as dramatic