How Does Elie Wiesel Use Metaphors In Night

It was the nineteenth century, nobody thought a genocide could possibly happen at that point in history. The concentration camps were horrible places where men, women, and children were dehumanized, used as slave labor, and slaughtered in a moment’s notice. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, Elie writes about his time in the concentration camps and what terrible things took place in them and he uses the book’s title as a metaphor many times in the book.
One of the first things to happen to Elie and his family was be separated, Elie went with his father and his sisters went with their mother. Physically separating families has a huge impact on each family member’s mental state. Families often turned on the family member they were still with, if there …show more content…
They were forced to do hard, dangerous, meticulous work daily unless they had a serious medical condition. When they didn’t have to run to the next camp, they were jammed into cattle cars for the long journey. Most of the people on the cars didn’t live to see the next camp. At the camps, they were given a daily ration of soup and a piece of bread. In Elie’s book, he uses the word ‘night’ as a metaphor in different ways.
One of the metaphors Elie uses is how ‘night’ meant the absence of God. Elie goes into the concentration camps as a very religious person. Once he saw what terrible things his God was allowing to happen to his own people, his realized that there was no God to save them. Elie heard a man say at the hanging of the young boy “Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging from the gallows” (65). This implies that God is dead or no longer with the Jewish people. The word night was also implied as being a time of unknowing.
The Jews never knew what was going to happen during the night or the next morning. ‘Night’ represents the whole time in the camp which was filled with uncertainty. Nobody knew what might happen to them next. When they were liberated, that was dawn. Although there was still some uncertainty, they knew that they would be safe and would never have to go back to that

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