Elie's Dark Experience

Elie’s Dark Experience

Night by Elie Wiesel is a short one-hundred and twenty page narrative, which is

written in first person participant point of view, and is on the experiences that Elie

endured during World War II with his family. The narrative is about Elie and his family,

along with other Jews from Sighet, Transylvania who are taken from their homes, put in

the ghettos and are stripped from their rights. Then transported to the Auschwitz

concentration camp, then Buchenwald. Will Elie and his family survive, and live to tell

the tale? Or will Elie live devastated that his family was taken from him? The literary

concepts that will be reviewed for this novel are point of view, setting, character traits,

and conflicts.  


The point of view refers to the narrator’s position and how he/she tells the story.

Night contains Elie Wiesel’s perspective of surviving the Holocaust when him and his

family got taken from their homes. The narrative is told in first person participant. For

instance, “I had many things to say, I did not have the word’s to say them” (Elie Wiesel,

ix). He is stating how his emotions took over his thoughts and words, and he could no

longer say what his thoughts were. This quote is an example of why the narrative is first

person participant because Elie is the one talking and the reader can understand the bias

coming from his side of the story, and can sense his emotional tone of when he said

“I did not have the words to say them”. It is effective to tell in first person because if it

was written in Third Person Limited, one would not be able to understand Elie’s

emotional tone. If it were in Third Person Objective, the reader would not be able to feel

any of the emotions that Elie is feeling; one would only read of what Elie’s actions are.

Cris can relate to the past, of what he knows happened in history, when World War II

started and the Germans were...