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How Does Elie Wiesel's Identity Change Throughout The Book Night

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In this memoir Night, Elie Wiesel retells his story of surviving in one of Hitler’s concentration camps. Wiesel survived the Holocaust, while unfortunately his parents and youngest sister do not. Wiesel’s identity changed completely throughout the Holocaust; he lost his faith in God and the events he was exposed to changed his persona.
Elie’s identity is changed immensely by his loss of faith. In the beginning of this novel, Wiesel’s faith is so powerful that he shows great emotion when he prays , “He watched me one day as I prayed at dusk. ‘Why do you cry when you pray’ he asked… ‘I cried because...because something inside me felt the need to cry. That was all I knew.” (4) From a young age Eliezer was interested in learning about his faith …show more content…

In the last five pages, Wiesel addresses his life after his father’s death until he gets freed by the Americans. Elie had only one desire in his life right now and it was food, “I spent my days in total idleness. With only one desire: to eat. I no longer thought of my father, or my mother. From time to time, I would dream. But only about soup, an extra ration of soup.” (113) Elie’s only desire was food because he lost everything else that was important to him and food was his only source of happiness, even though he barely got a ration. A year in the concentration camp brainwashed Elie and most people, this was shown when people killed their relatives for food and didn’t show emotion toward death and harm like Eliezer did. In last few lines of the book, Eliezer informs his audience about his mirror image a few weeks after he was freed from the concentration camp, “I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed has never left me.” While Elie was in the camps and weeks later, he was a corpse, not a real person who was full of emotion and passionate about his religion. Eliezer isn’t the same person from before the holocaust and he probably will never be the same

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