Can you provide an example of imagery in Night by Elie Wiesel?

The narrator, Elie, uses imagery to present clear visual images of the horrors of Auschwitz upon his arrival there. When he first arrives, Elie believes that he still has some control over his life:

We were brought some soup, one bowl of thick soup for each of us. I was terribly hungry, yet I refused to touch it. I was still the spoiled child of long ago.

The imagery here reminds readers that the horrors of the Holocaust victimized very typical children. Here is a child who is disgusted with an offering of "thick soup" as a meal. All parents can empathize with the plight of picky eaters, and Elie is thus captured in his refusal as a young boy who could be anyone's child.

The process of receiving required tattoos is also a moment of powerful imagery:

In the afternoon, they made us line up. Three prisoners brought a table and some medical instruments. We were told to roll up our left sleeves and file past the table. The three "veteran" prisoners, needles in hand, tattooed numbers on our left arms. I became A-7713.

This action effectively erases Elie's identity, as well as the identities of the other camp victims. The process is done with a sense of sterile detachment, and there is no emotion associated with this process. In fact, other prisoners are recruited for the work as well.

After remaining at Auschwitz for a few weeks, Elie and some other prisoners are transferred to Buna. They walk there, and the imagery of life outside the camp is presented as a sharp contrast to Elie's own bleak existence inside camp life:

On the way, we saw some young German girls. The guards began to tease them. The girls giggled. They allowed themselves to be kissed and tickled, bursting with laughter. They all were laughing, joking, and passing love notes to one another.

In captivity, there are no kisses and no tickling. The lives of these German girls reflect freedom and contentment. From a distance, they are able to watch a parade of camp inmates file by, and the sight doesn't even surprise them. This speaks to the horrific sense of normalcy which the Germans have grown accustomed to. In every way, this scene should have elicited anger and outrage, yet the emotions of the German crowd are shockingly peaceful and even joyful.

One of the most powerful examples of imagery in Night by Elie Wiesel is the brutal execution of a young boy by SS guards. The boy, a Dutch Oberkapo's pipel, is hanged for being involved in sabotage against the Germans. The execution is long, slow, and agonizing, causing immense suffering to the young boy.

As Eliezer and the other prisoners watch this demeaning spectacle, it's as if they're witnessing the sacrifice of a “sad-eyed angel.” The imagery is very powerful here, as the boy's appearance is one of youth and innocence. His angelic features make his execution all the more repugnant and vile. They also serve to heighten the evil of the Nazis, for whom there are clearly no depths of depravity.

The angel imagery makes it seem as if God Himself is hanging there on the gallows. Indeed, a little voice inside Eliezer says precisely that. For many of those witnessing this grisly spectacle, including Eliezer, this moment marks the end of their faith in God. If such an innocent young child can be slowly hanged to death with such cruelty and wanton brutality, then it seems that there is no longer any point in believing in an almighty, all-powerful God. If God has died on the gallows, then there's no one left to worship or believe in.

Imagery is the use of the senses to enhance description in literature, and Elie Wiesel does this very well throughout his autobiographical book, Night. In describing the horrors of the Holocaust, he brings us in through the imagery he employs. We are able to see it, hear it, feel it and sometimes even to smell it. One of the best examples comes in Chapter Four during a bomb alert. Two large pots of soup were left unguarded, and one man's hunger could not withstand the temptation:

"A man appeared, crawling like a worm in the direction of the cauldrons. 

"Hundreds of eyes followed his movements. Hundreds of men crawled with him, scraping their knees with his on the gravel. Every heart trembled, but with envy above all. This man had dared.

"He reached the first cauldron. Hearts raced;  He had succeeded. Jealousy consumed us, burned us up like straw." (Wiesel 56-57)

Nearly all of our senses are employed here. We see the man "crawling like a worm." We feel knees being scraped. We hear and feel hearts racing and trembling. Wiesel is masterful in his use of imagery. If you look at any page in his book, you will be able to find it easily!  

As a foreign Jew, Moishe the Beadle was deported by the Hungarian authorities from Sighet. Along with other Jews, he was taken to the Polish border, where the deportees were handed over to the Gestapo. There, the Jews were ordered off the train and told to dig their own graves in the forest. Once this was done, they were systematically murdered by the Nazis.

Miraculously, Moishe was able to escape and return to Sighet. Once he reaches town, he tells everyone who will listen about what happened to him. Unfortunately, no one is prepared to believe a word he says. The townsfolk regard Moishe as a lunatic and so feel able to ignore him. The Jews of Sighet are in denial and don't want to believe that what Moishe is saying is true because they cannot contemplate that something so horrifying could happen to them.

Sadly, that's exactly what does happen. Moishe's eyewitness account of the Nazi mass-murder of Jews foreshadows the horrors that will soon be inflicted on the Jews of Sighet. Before long, they will be rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, a concentration camp whose very name is synonymous with death, murder, and human suffering on a massive scale.

Author Elie Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor who wrote Night, a book about his experiences in the death camps during World War II. On the journey to the camp, he writes of his family:

My father was crying. It was the first time I saw him cry. I had never thought it possible. As for my mother, she was walking, her face a mask, without a word, deep in thought. I looked at my little sister, Tzipora, her blond hair neatly combed, her red coat over her arm: a little girl of seven. On her back a bag too heavy for her. She was clenching her teeth; she already knew it was useless to complain.

The only members of his family that he mentions here are his father, his mother, and Tzipora, all of whom perished in the camp. When they arrived, an SS officer commanded, "Men to the left! Women to the right!"

Wiesel writes,

Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother.

He never sees his mother again, as she perishes in the camp along with his sweet baby sister. He says of himself and his father,

we were alone. In a fraction of a second I could see my mother, my sisters, move to the right. Tzipora was holding Mother's hand. I saw them walking farther and farther away…

As they get “farther and farther away,” they recede in reality. In other words, this scene foreshadows their actual death and the fact that Elie never sees them again. He then says, “I didn't know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever.”

Because they were separated as soon as they arrived, Elie did not know for sure that his mother and sister perished in the camps until the war ended. By the time he wrote Night, however, he knew. He says of Tzipora's murder,

incredibly, the vanishing of a beautiful, well-behaved little Jewish girl with golden hair and a sad smile, murdered with her mother the very night of their arrival?

In the beginning of the book, Wiesel writes that in response to the law stating that Jews must wear Jewish stars on their outer garments, his father said, "'The yellow star? So what? It's not lethal," to which Elie the writer responds, "(Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)” This latter sentence foreshadows his father’s eventual death in the camps.

In the camp, Elie and his friend Juliek watch a hanging. Juliek whispers, “Will it be over soon?" Again, this is foreshadowing Juliek’s own imminent death: When Elie, Juliek, and others are being crushed together and gasping for air, Elie hears a violin, in the “dark barrack where the dead were piled on top of the living.” It is Juliek, playing a fragment of a Beethoven concerto. Juliek soon dies.

Rabbi Eliahu's story also foreshadows Elie’s self-recriminations about his treatment of his own father, whom he loves dearly. Elie recalls that Rabbi Eliahu's son had seen his father fall behind and let “the distance between them become greater...He had felt his father growing weaker and...thought by this separation to free himself of a burden that could diminish his own chance for survival.”

Then Elie writes,

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."

This is also foreshadowing of sorts because once his father dies, Elie has the same feeling of liberation. So, essentially, Elie does behave in a manner that is similar to Rabbi Eliahu’s son. He writes,

I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like: Free at last!

There are several examples of foreshadowing in Night.

In Chapter 1 of Night, Moishe the Beadle tells Elie that one day all Jews who were foreign-born were expelled from the ghetto in Sighet, and Moishe was a one of them. They were sent to a concentration camp in a Polish city called Oswiecim, annexed by the Nazi regime. Moishe tells Elie that the people were made to stand before a trench, then they were shot. They fell, dying, into the trenches. Fortunately, Moishe escaped because he was only wounded in his leg. Now, he goes from house to house, warning people. But they do not heed his warnings. They believe that the Red Army (Russia) is advancing on Germany; the news from London radio sounds encouraging as there are daily bombings of Germany and Stalingrad. Furthermore, no one believes that all the Jews can be harmed.

Annihilate an entire people? Wipe out a population dispersed throughout so many nations? So many millions of people! By what means? In the middle of the twentieth century! (Ch.1)

Because it is still possible to purchase emigration certificates to Palestine, Elie begs his father to sell his business so they can leave and live in Palestine. But his father will not consider departing from his home. He tells Elie that he is too old to start over. In the months that follow, German troops move into Budapest. A friend of Elie's returns from having spent Passover in Budapest, and he tells Elie,

"Anti-Semitic acts take place every day, in the streets, on the trains. The Fascists attack Jewish stores, synagogues. The situation is becoming very serious." (Ch.1)

Still, the residents of Elie's city do not believe that the Germans will reach them. Three days later, however, German troops drive into town. Elie's family's maid named Maria begs them to come to her hometown where she has a shelter for them. Mr. Wiesel refuses and tells Elie and his older sisters that they can go, but no one wants to break up the family.

Unfortunately, the unsuspecting Wiesels are among those loaded into cattle cars one day. As the Jews are transported out of the city, a woman known as Mrs. Schächter is extremely distraught, and she cries out, "Fire! I see a fire! I see a fire!" Although she claims that she can see "a terrible fire," when people peer through the narrow openings, they see nothing. She cries out some more times as they travel and others beat her. After they arrive at Auschwitz, Mrs. Schächter begins to cry out again about the fire. This time, the others see evidence of fire.

We stared at the flames in the darkness. A wretched stench floated in the air. (Ch.2)

At this point, the unsuspecting captives in the train do not understand what the flames and stench signify or what these elements foretell. Mrs. Schächter's visions foreshadow existence of the terrible crematorium.

One day Elie is comforted by a young woman after he has been severely beaten. Her words act as foreshadowing:

"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." (Ch.4)

Elie does survive, and he does tell his story on "another day."

What are three examples of animal imagery in Night by Elie Wiesel?

Before leaving for the camps, Elie Wiesel watches many of his acquaintances being led into the ghetto for a type of forced imprisonment. He notes:

They passed me by, like beaten dogs, with never a glance in my direction.

This comparison shows both the humiliation and the desperate position of these people. He notes the Chief Rabbi in the group, and even he is powerless against these forces. They are utterly defeated as they are led away from their homes with only tiny bundles of their lives to take with them.

Later, Wiesel finds himself on a train en route to a concentration camp. An officer announces,

"There are eighty of you in the car. If anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs."

This next reference to dogs shows that the Germans don't consider their prisoners humans. And, in fact, they are not treated as such. The Germans don't allow them any water, force them to hand over any valuable possessions at threat of being shot if discovered later, and leave them to suffer in unbearable heat. By many standards, dogs would be treated much better than the Germans treat these human beings.

Just after this, Wiesel notes,

The world had become a hermetically sealed cattle car.

Again, this comparison is dehumanizing and also alludes to a possible outcome of traveling in such a manner: the possibility of death at the end of the journey. Throughout the autobiography, Wiesel uses images and comparisons such as these to show the lack of value German soldiers place on the lives of those they imprison.

Eliezer and the other Jewish prisoners are herded aboard cattle trucks to be sent to Auschwitz. This indicates how the Nazis regard them as little more than animals. Later on, when the Red Army is fast approaching to liberate the camp, the inmates are forced to evacuate. But before they do, the Blockalteste orders the men to clean the blocks. This is so that the Russians will see that men lived here, not pigs. The Germans may have reduced the prisoners to the status of animals, but the men are determined to maintain what's left of their humanity.

Another reference to cattle comes in the scene where the Kapos choose the men for specific kinds of work. They point at the prisoners, saying "You . . . you . . . you!" as if they were choosing cattle or merchandise.

Wiesel uses animal imagery throughout Night to show the dehumanizing effect of the concentration camp on both the prisoners and the guards. 

For example, when Elie's father is beaten by a gypsy at Auschwitz, Elie describes his father falling to the ground and "crawling back to his place on all fours." Elie's father has been treated so savagely that he becomes animal-like in his reactions. 

Both the prisoners and guards are at times described as wolves. For example, Elie describes the head of the tent as a German whose hands are "like a wolf's paws." The head of the tent is savage in his behavior and his comparison to a wolf expresses this savagery. 

Later, during an air raid, Elie describes two cauldrons of soup left over that no one dares to touch. He says that hundreds of prisoners eyed them covetously and describes the soup cauldrons as "two lambs, with a hundred wolves lying in wait for them." A lone prisoner approaches the soup, "crawling like a worm." In this example, the prisoners are so hungry that they have become the wolves or worms. They've been reduced by hunger and torture to animal-like states. In the concentration camp, everyone is animal-like because the barbarity is so great that it reduces the guards to animals and the prisoners to frightened creatures who only have their will to survive intact and whose humanity has otherwise been stripped away from them. 

What are examples of imagery in Night by Elie Wiesel?

Weisel's memoir of the horrors of Nazi occupation and confinement in concentration camps is full of imagery. They are powerful, haunting, shocking images of what it was like for Weisel and other Jewish people at the time.

One of the most striking images is that of fire. In the train car, Madame Schachter becomes delirious and raves about a huge fire that will consume them all. It won't be long until Weisel learns that her delusion was actually prophetic, that fire awaits those who are not chosen to work.

Another image that haunts Weisel is that of the young boy who is hanged for refusing to give information about weapons that had been discovered hidden by one of the camp inmates. The boy and the man who had hidden the weapons were hanged, but the boy was so small that it took him a long time to die. Weisel had described the boy as having the face of an angel. After the hanging, there was nothing angelic about him.

A third image is that of the violin. One of the inmates has managed to keep his treasured violin with him, and on the night that they are made to run barefoot through the snow to another camp, many men die of starvation and exposure. Weisel hears music and wonders who could possibly play while corpses are piled all around them. It is the man who had saved his precious violin, and in the morning he too is dead.

Death, hunger, piles of clothing, ashes--all are images in this book.

One of the reasons Night is so searing is its use of imagery. Weisel uses images to make the horrors of the Holocaust vivid in the minds of readers who never experienced it. Consider one of the novel's most famous passages:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. 

As a reader safely in my home in 2017, I have no experience of the Holocaust. However, I know very well what children's faces look like, what a wreath looks like, and I have seen smoke. I have known many a "silent blue sky." Because I, as a reader, can create the building blocks of this image in my mind, I am able to envision the three together and feel something of Weisel's dismay. 

This is but one specific example. Weisel utilizes the same technique, the use of small, quotidian, concrete details to render the unimaginable real, throughout his memoir.

What are some examples of imagery in Night?

When we think of imagery we consider the way that the author of the text paints pictures for us by using as many of the five senses as possible in his or her description: sight, taste, touch, smell, hearing. Of course, most images depend heavily on sight. The visual element is always incredibly important. But it is interesting to find ways in which authors incorporate other senses to create a much fuller image. One of the most famous examples of imagery in this incredibly powerful and unforgettable text comes when Elie and his father arrive at the concentration camp and begin to face the reality of what is happening to them. In a series of statements, each beginning with "Never shall I forget," Elie evokes the horror of this experience. I will quote a few examples:

Never shall I forget the smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.

Note how, in these quotes, we have an incredibly strong visual element describing the transformation of children into smoke as they are burnt. However, note too the way in which hearing and smell are referred to. The smoke presumably can be smelt, and the sky is "silent," as if it is protesting against this abhorrent abuse of humanity. Likewise there is a "nocturnal silence" that strips the author of the desire to live. Thus we can see in these horrific images how the author combines different senses to paint an unforgettable canvas of what he experienced.