One of the most critical transformations in Elie is the way he views his faith. At the beginning (in
Sighet), Elie's faith is such a cornerstone of his personality that it is barely thought of as a conscious thing. Elie says, "Why did I pray? Strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?" (4). He's so pious that it's both as essential and as subconscious as breathing. Whether that's nature or nurture, it's there and isn't going away...or is it? In Birkenau, when he sees children being incinerated, Elie loses his faith for what seems like all eternity. He remarks, "Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never" (34). If you see something and it makes you forsake a massive chunk of your identity, it would have driven anyone weaker completely over the edge into utter insanity. As Buna crumbles around him, his faith seems to return to his subconscious, even as he resists it. Once he figures out what Rabbi Eliahu's son did to his father, Elie remarks, "And in spite of myself, a prayer formed inside me, a prayer to this God in whom I no longer believed. 'Oh God, Master of the Universe, give me the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahu's son has done'" (91). His faith has returned, even if he's in denial of it. And if you look past the end, you'll find that he's pious again, based on his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (he says a prayer, and believes in it, for those who didn't feel like going and reading it yourselves). Elie's faith seems to have been an inverted bell curve: he was extremely pious at the start of the book, lost it towards the middle, and picked it back up again towards the end of the book, then stayed pious for the rest of his life.
Another critical shift in Elie is the way he views other human beings, especially his father. At the beginning, he views his father as any normal boy would: as a background character to be defended when disparaged upon. He simply is, and that's enough. However, something shifts in Elie between Sighet and Auschwitz. When Elie's father is struck, he writes, "I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal's flesh" (39). After Elie's father dies and Buchenwald is liberated, he disregards his father's memory in favor of food: "Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. That's all we thought about. No thought of revenge, or of parents. Only of bread" (115). He's thinking in 'survival mode,' as it were: only focusing on his survival and not his humanity, or at least not his grief. This is not a commonly necessary thing to do, as humanity is, by definition, what makes us human (like our emotions and cameraderie). When humans are forced to resort to this, serious metal changes occur. This leads to us behaving like animals, so we can survive in order to stop behaving like animals. Elie also goes through such changes; he focuses on himself, and leaves his father's memory in the dust, if only for a short period of time. The horrors of the Holocaust did that to him, as well as causing him to write the book. I will leave you with his core message: Don't let historic atrocities repeat themselves.
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Works Cited
Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Print.
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