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In Night, how does Elie change throughout the memoir?

For many Holocaust survivors like Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust was the most transformative event of their lives. The concentration camps’ torturous conditions left mental and physical scars that lasted a lifetime. In Night, these events make a tremendous impact on Elie, who is only fifteen when he and his family are deported to Auschwitz.


Before deportation, Elie is a loyal, if somewhat timid, young man. He follows his parents’ wishes, but has a small...

For many Holocaust survivors like Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust was the most transformative event of their lives. The concentration camps’ torturous conditions left mental and physical scars that lasted a lifetime. In Night, these events make a tremendous impact on Elie, who is only fifteen when he and his family are deported to Auschwitz.


Before deportation, Elie is a loyal, if somewhat timid, young man. He follows his parents’ wishes, but has a small rebellious streak, as shown by his friendship with Moshe the Beadle. Elie’s first night at Auschwitz changes everything when he and his father, Shlomo, are separated from the rest of the family. After this point, Elie only has his father. With Shlomo growing weaker throughout the course of the memoir, Elie becomes Shlomo’s provider and guardian, reversing their parent-child relationship. A telling example of this switch occurs during the forced march near the end of the memoir. Running through the winter snow, Elie physically supports his father for much of the journey.


When Shlomo dies, Elie withdraws into himself. “Nothing mattered to me anymore,” Wiesel writes. During the war’s final days, he gives up all hope, resigned that Hitler “was about to keep his promise” to destroy the Jewish race. Fortunately, the Allied liberation saves Elie’s life. Despite this good turn of events, Wiesel leaves the reader a haunting image in Night’s penultimate sentence: “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me.” Not only is this sentence powerful because it describes Elie’s emaciated body, but it also suggests that everything that Elie was before the war is dead. The mirror shows Elie a "corpse" and a stranger.

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