Mya Plyler
Pre AP English
Mrs.Wiersig
Assignment: Stylistic analysis of Wiesel’s memoir, Night
November 21, 2014
In the memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel narrates his transformation from religiously devout, innocent boy to scarred, matured adolescent, mentally-marred by his experience in concentration camps. To express his change, Wiesel’s language changes from chapters one through five to six through nine through the use of diction and syntax by becoming less shocked and more weary, more concerned with his father’s needs, and with more complicated thought, establishing how his experience has forced him to mature.
In chapters one through five, Wiesel establishes his own and his fellow Jew’s denial and fear of the camps by using abstract diction. For example, early in the book, Wiesel describes how the ghettos he was living in were “ruled by delusion” with a sense of “normal”(12, 11) surrounding them. With the word choice, Wiesel depicts the false sense of security and state of denial surrounding the ghettos in Sighet, the people’s way of denying there was anything to fear. However, once they are transferred to Birkenau and evil is staring them in the face, their fear begins to become unearthed. For instance, Wiesel describes himself and his fellow prisoners as being “petrified” after a threat of “you will be burned”, later describing a French girl as being “paralyzed with fear”, and describing the struggle he and his fellow prisoners feel in the presence of unguarded cauldrons of soup, only stopped by the fact that “fear was greater than hunger”(31, 31, 53, 59). Wiesel exemplifies the deep level of fear felt to convey how these experiences cause Wiesel and the other prisoners to become stricken with fear, the first step in Hitler’s plan to exterminate them. Therefore, in chapters one through five, Wiesel depicts the early effects of the concentration camps through the use of abstract diction to portray how the Jews’ calm became terror.
In chapters six through nine, Wiesel begins to contrast his word choice in one through five by using morbid diction that express his longing for death. For example, whereas Wiesel was more concerned with safety before, he now puts “one foot in front of the other like a machine”, unable to go on, “chilled to the bone…parched, famished, and out of breath”(85, 87). These examples convey Wiesel’s growing desire to die, discouraged by the hardships he is forced to endure in the camps, now giving up on life itself. For instance, Wiesel and his fellow prisoners have “transcended everything- death, fatigue, [their] natural needs” (87); “there was no longer any reason to live, any reason to fight (99). Wiesel embodies his weariness through detached diction by expressing how, as his condition is worsening, his will to live is decreasing, while in chapters one through five, he still had the urge to fight against the odds conveyed by his use of bold diction
Wiesel also uses syntax to express how he changes by starting out in chapters one through five with short, terse sentence structure. For example, Wiesel begins individual scenes of his story with fragmented phrases like “spring 1944”, “anguish”, “the eight days of passover” and “night” (8,9,10, 21). Wiesel’s use of fragments conveys shock which is a result of his young age and trauma. Furthermore, Wiesel continues to tell his story in short, simplistic sentences such as “days went by”, “we had left the tents for the musicians’ block”, and “there was instant silence” (43 ,51, 71). Wiesel’s brief thought develops the speed at which Wiesel is experiencing the camps and how to him, everything is happening suddenly and quickly. Through Wiesel’s use of fragmented sentences in chapters one through five, we see the events of the Holocaust through the eyes of a child.
However, in chapters six through nine, we begin to see the maturity that has been forced upon Wiesel through his use of longer sentence structure. For instance, when Wiesel is looking back on a time when men fought like savages for a piece of bread, he reflects on a time “years later, [when he] witnessed a similar spectacle in Aden” (100) when natives fought over coins being thrown to them. These longer sentences embody the more sophisticated thought process Wiesel has developed as he matured; he no longer thinks like a boy the way he did at the beginning of the Holocaust. Furthermore, in chapters six through nine, there is a contrast to one through five as Wiesel develops a deeper understanding of his and his father’s conditions, realizing at one point the he “was no longer fighting with [his father], but with death itself” (105), and late seeing himself as “a corpse [that was] contemplating [him]” (115). Wiesel’s use of more detailed, analytical sentences not only represents the maturity he’s developed with age, but the wisdom that could only be obtained through a year in concentration camps, something he had only begun to experience in chapters one through five. Therefore, Wiesel’s use of fragmented sentences in chapters one through five to extended sentences in six through nine expresses the way he has changed mentally.
In conclusion, in Night, Wiesel changes his style of abstract diction from chapters one through five to morbid diction in six through nine to portray how he has become more eager to die and less concerned his fear of the camps, officers, and future. He also changes his sentence structure from simple to sophisticated to convey the transformation that has taken place in his thinking and view on the world. Therefore, Wiesel through the use of diction and syntax, Wiesel recreates for the reader how his experience in the Holocaust has changed him from an innocent Jewish boy, devoted to studying God’s word to a nearly-dead, permanently mentally scarred young man who has had years of his life stolen from him- years he can never get back or forget. Even still, through it all, Elie Wiesel is a survivor.