Night

Prompt:  What changes do we see in Wiesel?

     There are many changes that occur to Wiesel but there are only two that I am going to focus on.  How he changes in faith, and how he changes as a person. These two I felt are the two with the most significance because they are the two biggest aspects of his life, and quite frankly all that he has.  The only other three things he has are a number, a bowl, and his father.  Those are also  big aspects of his life but him as a person and how he changes in faith are probably the most significant.

     He changes in faith so drastically when he is in the Nazi death camps.  He entered as someone who believed in his god without question.  Some could say it's only because he had never been faced with a situation like this before, which is true.  I believe that it is not the situation that broke him, it was his will.  We see people like the Rabbi who continue to have faith, almost to the death march.  Wiesel is quick to lose his faith.  If he had the will to endure the camp and still believe in god then he probably would have continued being faithful.  Almost a quarter way through the book he starts to question and not believe in his god.

     We also see Wiesel as a person change drastically early in the book as well.  One of the first exhibits of this is when his father asks a gypsy deportee where the bathrooms are, but when the deportee strikes his father, Elie does nothing to stop him.  He says "I would have clawed and dug my nails into the criminals neck before all this."  He would have defended his father before he was sent to the camp.  Not far after that, we see that Elie is angry with his father for being struck.  He thinks that his father should know better, to be able to handle those beating in a proper way.  Then we see towards the end of the book when his father of sick and dying and Elie is looking for him he thinks, "Oh, please don't let me find him."  He thought he could lose the dead weight and take the rations that would be given to his father.