son killed his father over a crust of bread.

Another example of foreshadowing is when Idek was beating Elie's father. He stated, "What's more, if I felt anger at the moment, it was not directed at the Kapo, but at my father. Why couldn't he have avoided Idek's wrath. That is what life in a concentration camp had made of me..." This is important foreshadowing about Elie's changing feelings regarding his father. In chapter 3, when the Kapo hit his father, Elie became angry and wanted to avenge his father. At this time, he was angry with his father for getting hurt. By chapter 8, Elie began to resent his father, as his father had become a huge burden to him.

Toward the end of the chapter, Elie talked about a young Pipel who was beating his father for not making the bed properly. The father was crying, and the son yelled, "If you don't stop crying instantly, I will no longer bring you bread. Understood?" This foreshadows the breakdown of the father-son relationships that happen in the story. In addition to the breakdown of Elie's relationship with his father, there were two other father-son relationships Elie spoke about. In chapter 6, Elie discussed how the Rabbi was looking for his son. After Elie told the Rabbi he had not seen the son, Elie remembered that he had seen the son running ahead of his father because the Rabbi was falling behind. This is after the Rabbi and his son had stuck by each other for the last three years. In chapter 7, Elie witnessed a son killing his father for a piece of bread. In chapter 8, Elie began to resent his father and was secretly relieved when his father died.

At the end of chapter 4, a Pipel with the face of an angel, who was well loved, was hanged. Someone in line asked,

"Where is Merciful God, where is He?" Later, someone asked, "For God's sake, where is God?" And from within me, I heard a voice answer: "Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows..."

This is foreshadowing of the continued theme of loss of faith. In chapter 5, Elie questioned why he should bless God's name. He blamed God for the concentration camps, the crematoriums, and the torture. In chapter 6, Elie prayed to a God he no longer believed in. By chapter 7, God no longer existed. In addition to Elie's loss of faith, Akiba Drumer, the most devout of all the Jews, lost his faith. The symbolic death of God in the form of the Pipel foreshadows the death of God in Elie.

The fact that the soup tasted like corpses after the death of the Pipel is another example of foreshadowing. The corpse is the death of the Pipel and the death of faith in God. The fact that the soup tastes like corpses foreshadows the corpses that litter the trail on the run to Gliewitz, the corpses that are piled up in the barracks at Gliewitz, the corpse thrown off the train, and most importantly, Elie. At the end of chapter 9, Elie looked in the mirror and saw a corpse looking back at him.

In the fourth chapter of the book Night by Elie Wiesel, readers can find examples of foreshadowing. When Eliezer and his father first arrive at Buna and are waiting to find out which unit/camp they will be assigned to, an aide to their tent leader approaches Eliezer. He wants his shoes in exchange for help getting "into a good Kommando" and being able to stay with his father (Wiesel, 48). Eliezer does not want to give up his shoes, however. The aide offers to also give Eliezer an extra ration of bread with margarine, but still he refuses. Later, Eliezer is forced to give up his shoes to someone else and given nothing in return. This foreshadows what happens later in the chapter when Franek wants Eliezer's gold tooth. Eliezer is hoping to keep his tooth so that he can trade it if necessary for extra food or to save his and his father's lives. In the end, Franek tortures Eliezer's father until he agrees to give the tooth. This time, Eliezer even has to give up some of his food on top of losing the tooth.

Another example of foreshadowing occurs when Eliezer's father is being tortured by Franek. Wiesel writes, "Unfortunately, Franek knew how to handle this; he knew my weak spot" (55). His weakness was his father and would continue to be his father throughout the events of the story. Just before the camp is liberated, Eliezer's father becomes deathly ill and eventually dies. When his father, his weakness, is finally gone, Eliezer feels a sense of freedom. Wiesel writes, "...if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: free at last!" to explain his reaction to his father's death (112).

A third example of foreshadowing can be found when Eliezer describes his encounter with the young Frenchwoman he works beside in the factory. She comforts him after a brutal beating by Idek, revealing she speaks German, where before Eliezer assumed they could not communicate. She says to him, "Bite your lips, little brother...Don't cry. Keep your anger, your hate, for another day, for later. The day will come, but not now...Wait. Clench your teeth and wait" (53). This foreshadows that liberation will come and that Eliezer will survive.

The opening line provides foreshadowing in this chapter:

The summer was coming to an end.

Summer is often equated with a sense of freedom and growth. In this line, then, we see the impending end of both of these ideas for Elie. Gripped by the power of the SS, he begins to lose any hope of a return to normalcy and the freedoms he once enjoyed.

Further foreshadowing focuses on Elie's father:

And my father? Suddenly I remembered him. How would he pass the selection? He had aged so much...

This line foreshadows the long journey ahead for Elie in trying to protect his father. He realizes the advantage of youth in this situation and the inherent difficulty in continuing to pass selections with an older body. These lines speak to the long and difficult journey Elie will be forced to undertake in an effort to save his father.

When Elie is hospitalized later in this chapter and yells out a condemnation of Hitler, his roommate replies,

“I’ve got more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He’s only one who’s kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.”

This foreshadows the future devastation that Hitler will bring, just as he has promised to do. It offers no end for Elie and the rest of the prisoners as Hitler has proved ruthless and has maintained his promises against the Jewish people. Thus, these lines foreshadow a long period of hopelessness for Elie, devoid of any possibility of escape.

Several times in the book, Elie and his father are caught in a delicate balance between life and death. He captures that feeling as he lies in bed in this chapter:

Through the frosted panes bursts of red light could be seen. Cannon shots split the nighttime silence. How close the Russians were!

Liberation is so close, yet Elie remains a prisoner, hidden behind cold, frosted panes of glass. This symbolism foreshadows a long struggle ahead during which Elie will be able to almost see his freedom, yet remain trapped in the darkness, only catching an occasional glimpse of the red light of liberation.

In literature, an allusion is an indirect reference to a recognizable person, place, or historical event. There are many early allusions in the novel Night by Elie Wiesel that foreshadow events that happen later in the story. In chapter 1, the Nazis enter the small town of Sighet and Elie alludes to the eight days of Passover, which is a significant Jewish holiday that commemorates the story of the Israelites’ departure from ancient Egypt. Similar to the ancient Israelites, who suffered under oppressive Egyptian rule and were eventually forced to flee the foreign country, the Jewish citizens of Sighet also suffer under the harsh rule of the Nazis. Elie shows how the Nazis oppress the Jewish population by establishing edicts that limit their freedom and segregate them from society. The allusion to the Passover also foreshadows the transportation of Jewish citizens from Sighet to the Nazi concentration camps. Similar to the events of Exodus, the Jews of Sighet are forced to gather their small belongings, embark on an arduous journey, and travel a great distance.

Foreshadowing is used frequently in Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical novel Night, and it is especially noticeable to anyone who has read the book more than once.

Almost immediately, in section 1, the narrator mentions that as a young boy he “believed profoundly,” thus ironically foreshadowing his later religious doubts.  Likewise, within the first page or so the boy mentions that he used to weep when he prayed. When asked why, he replied that “something inside of me . . . felt the need for tears” – words that will seem all the more meaningful in light of the tragic and pitiful events the book later describes.

At one point in section 1 a mentor of the narrator tells the narrator that

“Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him . . . . That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don’t understand his answers. We can’t understand them. . . .”

This passage is obviously relevant to the book’s later emphasis on asking difficult questions of God and of being uncertain about the answers provided, if any.

However, one of the passages in section 1 that is most disturbing in its use of foreshadowing is a passage in which the narrator mentions a group of foreign Jews who were expelled from his native village:

Crammed into cattle trains by Hungarian police, they wept bitterly. We stood on the platform and wept too. The train disappeared on the horizon; it left nothing behind but its thick, dirty smoke. [emphasis added]

All the words and phrases emphasized here provide grim and eerie foreshadowing of later sections of the book.

A passage in section 2 foreshadowed by some of the passages already quoted (and in turn foreshadowing later passages) is this one, prompted by the narrator’s personal experiences in a concentration camp:

Some talked of of God, of his mysterious ways, of the sins of the Jewish people, and of their future deliverance. But I had ceased to pray. How I sympathized with Job! I did not deny God’s existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.

Earlier the boy had been told that God’s answers are not entirely clear; now he has good reason to think so himself.

As a younger boy, the narrator had indeed prayed; now he doesn’t.  As a younger boy, the narrator had been told that God was mysterious; now he is confronted personally with one of the most mysterious aspects of God: his apparent tolerance of earthly evil.

Wiesel's book is tied together by many passages that foreshadow others and that in turn recall passages from earlier in the work.

• Eliezer's mother tells him that she's just seen two new faces in the ghetto. They were two German officers, and she believes them to be members of the Gestapo, the German secret police. This is very ominous news indeed. At this point in the narrative, most of the Jews in the Sighet ghetto have convinced themselves that they will come to no harm. They've been lulled into a false sense of security by the Germans, who've given them some measure of control over their lives through the establishment of the Jewish Council. But the presence of the two Gestapo officers indicates what plans the Nazis really have in store for Eliezer and the rest of the Jews in the ghetto.

• The Jews of the Sighet ghetto are forced by the Nazis to wear yellow stars of David on their clothing to identify them as Jews. Eliezer's father, however, doesn't seem too bothered. The stars aren't going to kill them, so what does it matter? However, this scene foreshadows what will happen to the Jews in due course. In being forced to wear these yellow stars, they're effectively being marked for death by the Nazis.

• News comes over the radio that Admiral Horthy, Regent of Hungary, has been forced by Hitler to form a government with the Fascist Arrow Cross Party. Up until now, events in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, had always seemed so far away for the Jews of Sighet. But the seizure of power by Hungarian Nazis foreshadows the subsequent rounding up of Jews into ghettos prior to their deportation to the death camps of Eastern Europe.

I think that the narrative contains some wonderful instances of foreshadowing.  The first five pages of the narrative is one of the first examples of foreshadowing with Moshe the Beadle.  The fact that Moshe lives to tell his tale of horror is something that Elie Wiesel himself experienced later on with the publication of his memoir.  Another example of foreshadowing would be Madame Schachter yelling "fire" uncontrollably aboard the train.  The fact that she was able to foreshadow the fires of Birkenau, something that Eliezer's father reminded the son of during their time at the camp.  Another example of foreshadowing would be Rabbi Eliahu's son abandoning the father.  When Eliezer says that he would never do such a thing to his own father, it foreshadows both what the situaiton in which he is going to be placed and the fact that he infact does abandon his father in his time of need.  These are but a few of examples of foreshadowing in Wiesel's work.