“Bread, soup – these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.”
It is through stories such as Night, by Elie Wiesel that we become painfully aware of our own mortality once more, or even for the first time; the impermanence of our flesh, the constant march towards the end. It’s an odd feeling to become aware of – a certain kind of dread and peace; yet not a positive peace, rather an acceptance, like the final stage of grief. As much as we all like to think in the end that we are enlightened creatures, we are really just animals that happen to have a unique brain structure. When we lose everything – hope, family, rationality – all that remains are our barest of functions. Our cultural code tells us two opposing tales; restrict your instincts and your inner ‘animal’ so that you will not face dire consequences, or free yourself from bindings and do what it takes to survive and be liberated.
In Night, we live through the harrowing true story of a Holocaust survivor as his humanity is stolen from him. Yes, stolen is the right word here, as this is not a tale of someone letting go of themselves. By all means, the beginning of the story shows the author living a normal, healthy life. He and his family are good people with compassion and care for others, and even as the situation decays he tries desperately to cling to his own sense of what is morally right. It is the circumstances that steal this from him, and we watch the decline from inside of his mind as he struggles with what is left of himself versus what he needs to do as a starving animal. Symbolic codes we are taught from birth teach us that animals and humans are in direct opposition, but in the end, the line that separates them is thinner than we would like to believe.
When he realizes the Rabbi’s son had abandoned his father, he turns the idea over and over in his head, realizing his own temptation to abandon his father and fend for himself. However, at this time he was not yet pushed to a point to do so. When his father begins to slowly die of illness, he finds himself plagued with the impulse to strangle him, put him out of his misery, claim his rations as his own and save himself. Still, he refuses to – the man and beast inside of him are in constant battle, and thus he does not act.
These are two controlling ideas that battle throughout the story; compassion and survival. When stripped of everything – our identities, our family, our lives – what remains? Two answers to that question live in complete opposition to one another. Some believe that you can always hold onto your compassion, empathy, and care for others, even in the face of dehumanizing treatment. Others believe that deep down, human beings have always been inherently selfish creatures, and when it comes down to it, when truly desperate and afraid, people will always act in their own self-interest. The Hierarchy of Needs places food and shelter below the satisfaction of caring for others and being cared for in return. Our culture teaches us to be selfless and true, but how many people actually follow that code?
The author is caught between these two ideas, often represented literally beside him. The cruel world represents the primal hunger, the selfish desire to live no matter what happens. Meanwhile, by his side is his father, who cares for him until death starts to claim his mind. Neither idea is depicted as ‘right’, because there is no right answer in a tragedy. While this is a story artfully told, and can be analyzed the same as a work of fiction in some ways, it is a true story. Thus, it is messy. There are no clear-cut morals, no logical answers, no way to figure out what is right and what is wrong.
The author cowers as his father dies alone, crying out for his son. He is afraid of dying as well, so afraid that he does nothing to comfort his father. The act is cruel in some ways, but it is not wrong. To say it is wrong is reductive to the value of the author’s own life. He was sixteen and afraid, beaten down by life and left to rot by the world. All he could do was make it through each day, and to do that he had to let go of his dying father. Still, what kind of justification could be enough? How does one find a compromise between contradicting morals and actions? A person could find the most justifiable reasons to act and still feel immeasurable guilt.
“Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?”
When he looked in the mirror for the first time in years, it wasn’t just the change in appearance he was shocked by.
Read the Room 
“I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!…” (Wiesel, 112). This is a quote that stuck out to me and I have mentioned in my blog before. With this quote, we can begin to look at the controlling and opposite controlling values of Night. As Elie’s father called out for him and was being beaten, Elie remained silent. A controlling value that caused Elie to remain silent as his father died could be: silence and compliance leads to survival and safety. An opposite controlling value that would condemn Elie’s action of remaining silent as his father died could be: remaining silent as a loved one is dying is a cowardly act. Does Elie break the cultural code through the controlling value? He has to live with the guilt of letting his father die, contributing to his death, and doing nothing about it. He remained silent. He did not speak up or try to save him at that moment. But when faced with the choice to try and save a loved one which could possibly end with both yourself and the loved one being in danger or dying OR letting a loved one die in order to guarantee your safety and life…which would you choose?
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Were Elie and his father losing their humanity or did their tragedies bring their humanity to the surface? Within two pages of the book Night, we see both sides of the argument. First Elie says, “I shall never forget the gratitude that shone in his eyes when he swallowed this beverage. The gratitudes of a wounded animal. With these few mouthfuls of hot water, I had probably given him more satisfaction than during my entire childhood” (Wiesel 106-107). He is pointing out the animalistic base instincts that his father is exhibiting to survive by any means. Even while they are being stripped down to their base instincts, Elie still shows humanity by saying “I gave him what was left of my soup” (Wiesel 107). Then he admits his human faults, “But my heart was heavy. I was aware that I was doing it grudgingly. Just like Rabbi Eliahu’s Son, I had not passed the test” (Wiesel 107). Elie’s father is allowing the circumstances to make him less than human, just an eating, breathing, submissive machine. However, the circumstances are putting Elie in a position where he has to decide whether to help his father to the detriment of himself.
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“I watched other hangings. I never saw a single victim weep. These withered bodies had long forgotten the bitter taste of tears”(Wiesel 63). This statement tells us that Elie Wiesel can no longer refer to these people as human beings he uses phrases such as corpse and body. He cannot even refer to himself as a human he says “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me”(Wiesel 115). Was it because he was desensitized to it or because he had to in order to survive and keep his sanity? Or is it because being treated like animals caused them to subconsciously become animalistic themselves? However, Wiesel says that he did not do anything to save himself so maybe you can’t help but adapt to a situation like this, because human instinct is fight or flight, but Wiesel did not fight back and it was impossible for him to run. So what then? Maybe he even referred to them as bodies and corpse because he believed they were all already dead. Even after they were liberated Wiesel refers to himself as a corpse which leads me to believe he still believed he should have died in the camps.
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