Student Question
What is a good thesis statement about the symbol of silence in Night by Elie Wiesel?
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A strong thesis statement about the symbol of silence in Night could focus on how Elie Wiesel uses silence to illustrate the complicity and indifference of both God and humanity in the face of Holocaust atrocities. This silence is mirrored in the characters' interactions, such as Moshe the Beadle and Madame Schachter's warnings being ignored, and Eliezer's silence during his father's suffering, highlighting the moral failure that allowed such horrors to occur.
Much of this is going to depend on what you wish to prove or what it is you need to prove. On one hand, I think that it might really interesting to examine how God is silent in Wiesel's narrative. One of Wiesel's most basic claims is that God remained silent in the face of unspeakable cruelty. At the same time, Wiesel plays with this in how human beings treat one another. There is a silence in how human beings interact with one another. Moshe the Beadle comes back to speak of the difficulty that will be endured by the villagers of Sighet. He is greeted with scorn and disregard. Madame Schachter speaks of the fires and the flames, and she is ostracized, physically silenced by the other people on the train. Even Eliezer remains silent while his father screams in pain and calls out for help. It is in...
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this where Wiesel might be making his greatest statement about silence and the human predicament. A thesis here might be that the deeper true horror of the Holocaust is not what the Nazis did, but the behavior that they legitimized as human beings dehumanized one another with silence and apathy.
What is a good thesis statement on symbolism in Elie Wiesel's Night?
“Night,” by Elie Wiesel, is a novel of young Wiesel’s survival in the concentration camps during WWII.
There are several symbols in the novel. One of the main symbols is the night itself. Wiesel uses night to symbolize the darkness of the history of the Jewish people during this time. It also symbolizes Elie’s loss of his faith in God. Another symbol is fire. There are many places in the novel where fire is mentioned and a good example of this is when they arrive at Auschwitz. “A young Pole who was in charge welcomed us to Auschwitz, “The same smoke hovers over all our heads.”
Another example is when they are first taken into custody and don’t really understand what is happening. A more experienced Jewish man says, “Over there. Do you see the chimney over there? Do you see it? And the flames, do you see them? (Yes, we saw the flames). Over there, that is where they will take you. You will be burned; burned to cinders.”
As a thesis you might compare the symbols of night and fire and how they directly affect each other throughout the novel.