NIght Essay

Night is a true story based on a man who went through the Holocaust, he survived it and is still living at this time. In the story by Elie Wiesel who is also the main character, he encounters many conflicts as is moved from place to place throughout that time. With these conflicts there comes character versus character, character versus society, and character versus self, these are challenges that he thinks he will not be able to overcome, but proving himself wrong he still lives. Elie conflicts with his thoughts and actions of him and others as he survives the times of the holocaust.

In the story Ellie has many conflicts with himself, he doesn’t know if he is sure of what he used to be confident in. He has conflicts with himself because of his current thoughts running through his mind. He questions his faith and doesn’t believe that he has a strong of a faith as he did before all hell came down on them. HE is not sure that the God they are serving actually cares about them, because of what him and his family are going through. “For the first time, I felt revolt rise up in me. Why should I bless his name? The Eternal, Lord of the universe, the all Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank him for?” (31). As shown in this quote he is slowly losing his faith because of the brutal position at the camps he is put in. Losing his faith, he slowly begins to question if there really is a God up there watching over him and his people. He sees the other men spending every waking hour praying to God, and he is not even sure f there is really a God up there to pray to so he doesn’t know what to do so he works and listens to what he is told to do.

When Elie is taken from his hometown just to go into a ghetto and later into a dreadful concentration camp. The other characters had either major or minor conflicts with Elie that were dealt with in a manner that was not appealing to some but amusing to others some of the people found it terrifying and horrible. one day while at work Elie saw some commotion off in a corner, in that corner there was a man getting beat almost to death, it was his father. “Suddenly his frenzy broke out. The victim was my father, ‘You lazy old devil!’ And he began to beat him with an iron bar” (52). He witnessed his father get beat for so long that, like a tree he split in half. This is a perfect example of character versus character, and he didn’t even stand up or protect his father he just sat and watched like the other bystanders who had no connection to him.

In the concentration camps they treated the Jews as if they were on a status lower then an animal. In their eyes the Jews were not even humans, they were just people who worked for them and who they beat at any given time. There was some character versus society moments in the story. In one part the story they were all running and he had to avoid getting hit from the superior figures. He ran in the middle of the group so the men on the outside could get hit with the whips and truncheons. “Ten gypsies had come and joined our supervisor. Whips and truncheons cracked around me.my feet were running without me being aware of it. i tried to hide from the blows behind others” (37). The society in which he grew up in compared to the one in this camp is without a doubt completely different. He gets beat when something is done that he didn’t even do, and his little sister didn’t do it, a complete stranger did it.

Elie is put through hell on earth. HE has begun to question whether he has a strong faith and he began to wonder if there was even a God up there and why he would let him and his people go through such a little He got into conflicts with other men there, the leaders and he even witnessed his dad get beat half to death. He didn’t do a thing about it besides watch all this brutality happen. He was conflicted by his thoughts and actions, the actions of others were some of the things that helped him to survive and dodge trouble while in the camps.