Examples Of Power In Night By Elie Wiesel

Targeting people due to their identity. Murdering tens of thousands of innocent people. Disrespecting the deceased. These three scenarios all depict man’s inhumanity to man. The oppression of mass amounts of people is often portrayed in not only life, but also in literature and film. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel describes the inhumanity he endured while in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Additionally, in the film Hotel Rwanda, the producers portray the acts of atrocities toward Tutsi and Hutu refugees during the Rwandan genocide. Inhumanity is a universal cruelty toward human life which man often “turns a blind eye to” due to their apathy.

Animal Farm begins on Manor Farm, where overworked, tired, and hungry animals are unhappy in the conditions that they are in, but when an old boar named Old Major introduces the idea of a rebellion and encourages the animals to take control over the farm, the animals begin an uprising against the humans, taking control over the land and renaming the farm “Animal Farm.” However, greedy and corrupt leaders rise to power and turn a once prosperous farm, into a nightmare. In Animal Farm, George Orwell asserts the idea that absolute power results in corruption. Napoleon and the other pigs, interested in remaining superior, persuades the other animals by using intimidation and emotional appeals in order to keep control of the gullible animals.

The novel ‘Animal Farm’ created by George Orwell heavily expresses the ideals of a prolonged cruel or unjust treatment and the exercise of authority. The exponential ignorance of the farm animals towards the actions and ideas of the pigs (Napoleon, Squealer and Snowball) prove the incentive that it is easier to conform to the ideals/ways of the ‘New England’, than to rebel, as well as through the exposure to propaganda and the distortion of reality. This therefore leaving them docile, numb, and oppressed.

Orwell reveals the corruption of the farm’s rules, which mandated, “they were not as other animals. If they were hungry, it was not from feeding tyrannical human beings; if they worked hard, at least they worked for themselves. No creature among them went upon two legs. No creature called any other creature ‘Master’, all animals were equal” (Orwell 62).

Unchallenged authority leads to unnecessary aggression and violence. Power is extremely hard to control through one being in our human nature, so a balance of power is often the only way to rule effectively without going over the line. Power will take over and turn to aggression even toward the innocent inferiors of this world. In the novel Night, author Wiesel speaks of the extremes that unlimited power will lead to using imagery, details, and diction to outline his first-hand experiences under an overkill authority. Wiesel demonstrates his harsh days under unjust rulers through touching diction.

Imagine, people at your feet, doing everything you ask, raising you higher and better than everyone else. Does it feel good to live a life of luxury? Some would give up everything they have to achieve this fantasy, and the ones who finally have it never let it go. This is what it is like to have power and most abuse it. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, it follows a young boy named Elie, through a tragic event called the holocaust. Through so many traumatizing moments of fear and helplessness gives the ongoing theme of power, or the abuse of power. Power is something that an individual gains by asserting authority over others and can influence what they do or what happens. In this case many people that took part in the holocaust abused their power to accomplish extreme genocide. The abuse of power originated from Hitler, onto the people who ran the concentration camps, and to the people directly looking over the mistreated Jews.

The color of our skin, our beliefs, where we come from, these are some of the most controversial subjects ever. Since the beginning of time, violence has been around for it all and it will never stop. Some examples of violence are small, like a fight or verbal disagreement, but some, like the Holocaust and the Hutu massacre of Tutsi, have changed history forever. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie gives readers a sense of how bad the Holocaust was through his own eyes. Violence is a huge theme in this book and has a huge effect on not only Elie, but his dad, Shlomo, as well.

Power is the possession of control, authority, or influence over others, one having such power puts them in control, and to be in control is the power to influence or direct people's behavior. How does power and control affect the characters in the novel? In the novels Night by Elie Wiesal and 1984 by George Orwell, power and control is shown by the superiors towards the subordinates, by comparing and the themes of loss of humanity, fear, and self preservation. In both novels it is clear to see that power and control affects the way the characters act and think.

Inhumanity. The cruelest of people are responsible for this. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses imagery, tone, and characterization to show the effects of inhumane actions. Night is about a young boy and his father who get separated from the rest of their family during selection of the Holocaust. This story tells how Elie survived his times in the concentration camps, even with all of the inhumane actions of the Germans.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” (Burke 1867). In the book Night, almost every scene was giving mankind, human race, power. The main reason why the mankind got power in the book was because there weren’t many upstanders; there were many bystanders. In the book Night, there were 3 scenes that were unforgettable, so it was very vivid in my mind. These 3 scenes were not only vivid, but they also led way to mankind to have power.

Throughout Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie recounts his experience in the concentration camps of the Holocaust. Elie, his father, and the millions of other prisoners endure horrific abuse and torture inflicted by the S.S. officers. Throughout the novel, Elie and the other prisoners survive being horribly tortured and bullied by the S.S. officers, while many people witnessed it, but did nothing to help. Bullying and the bystander effect are depicted throughout Wiesel’s novel, and Wiesel also addresses them in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

When someone is face to face with atrocious acts and cruel treatments, any regular human being could transform into the meanest of brutes. The people who were tortured, abused, neglected, and or stripped of their very own dignity leading to self-preservation by any possible means necessary, even if it meant forgetting those who they love just to survive on their own terms. Because of this, there are people who also become desensitized towards brutality and inhumanity that occurs around them. In the Holocaust novel, “Night,” the young Elie Wiesel has succumb to a scarring fate; he has witnessed a countless amount of people being tortured, neglected, abused, and even killed, but he showed little emotion, he experienced many fleeting thoughts that raced through his head about how life for him would be a lot easier without his father dragging him down and he was relieved and felt freedom when

“The bread, the soup—those were my entire life. I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.” (Wiesel 52) In the autobiography ‘Night’ published in 1960 by Elie Wiesel, he shares his thoughts on his existence with us with the help of a soup bowl and an empty stomach. The Holocaust had stripped everything that ever was of Elie, and all he had left were the things that kept him surviving every day. Nazis jobs were to do just that, take everything away from the victims of the Holocaust. They were deindividualized, reduced to numbers. When people are given an air of authority, they will do anything to maintain the power because the power is what makes them thrive. They will push limits,

The Holocaust is one of the most well known historical events to this day. As many as 6 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazi soldiers, and many suspect that there were even more. Night by Elie Wiesel is a memoir of Wiesel’s time in various concentration camps during the Holocaust. It begins in Wiesel’s hometown of Sighet, Transylvania, and follow the journey of the main character Eliezer. A few main themes of this historic recount are silence, night, and inhumanity. Night has many examples of inhumanity, specifically violence toward the inmates. Wiesel’s memoir shines a light on the violence and the inhumanity of the Nazis, and this impacts Eliezer, the book’s theme of inhumanity, and the reader.

In Animal Farm, George Orwell uses motifs and various characterizations to create a critique on the perception of leaders and their roles. The “pigs were so clever… superior… natural… assume leadership.”(Orwell 27). Orwell describes the pigs as clever throughout the book, giving them justification that they should make the decisions and be the leaders. Because the pigs assume they have the right to be the leaders, they believe they are superior to all the other animals on the farm. Due to this leadership, the pigs could gain what they wanted from the animals. Squealer explained that “Milk and apples(this has been proven by science, comrades)... [was] necessary to the well being of a pig.”(Orwell 35). By explaining that eating the milk and apples as something “necessary” only to the pigs, Squealer was elevating the pigs above the other animals. The milk and apples were something all of the animals wanted to eat. Squealer used the authority of the pigs and himself being a pig, to prove they