I need an explanation for this Philosophy question to help me study.

Night by ellie wiesel

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I want you to identify and discuss with your classmates what you think one of the central themes of Night is. This discussion is meant to aid you in your revisions of your literary analysis of the text. Your assignment asks that you analyze the text to give your insight into the author’s purpose in writing his personal history as an inmate at a concentration camp during WW2. So for this assignment, write a paragraph that elaborates upon the themes of the work, and cite a specific instance in the text that helps evidence or support your reading of the text. Lastly, do not forget to comment on two of your classmates’ responses with a thoughtful response that helps guide the discussion of themes of this work.

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I think one of the central themes for this book was silence. Throughout this book, there is no doubt that religion was a central theme as well, but I think silence from their God and from other people was a main factor. In the beginning of the book, when they are being forced to run thought the streets, he states, “From behind their windows, from behind their shutters, our fellow citizens watched as we pass.” (pg. 19) A little while longer when they are in the concentration camp, his father states, “The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible…” (pg. 33) His father gets slapped by an officer, and knocked him down. He states, “My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent.” (pg. 39)

Silence plays a key role in this book because there are many times people are getting tortured or dying, and they question the silence of God and start losing their faith. He gets separated from his mother and sister forever, has to watch his father get beat, his father has to watch him get tortured and whipped 25 times. He has to silently watch children and babies get thrown and burned to death. Watch people get shot daily. He questions the silence of his God and why he hasn’t shown up. In the book, he questions his faith a lot in the concentration camp and says, “Why, but why would I bless Him? Because he caused thousands of children to burn in his mass graves? …. Praise be to Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?” (pg. 67) There is silence not only from God, but from the people themselves. He also questions his own silence towards the end of the book, especially with his father’s death.

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In one of Night’s most renowned sections, Eliezer states, “Never will I overlook that nighttime quietness which denied me, forever, of the longing to live.” It is the possibility of God’s quietness that he finds generally alarming, as this portrayal of an occasion at Buna uncovers: as the Gestapo hangs a little youngster, a man asks, “Where is God?” yet the main reaction is “[t]otal quietness all through the camp.” Eliezer and his colleagues are left to consider how an all powerful, all-ground-breaking God can permit such awfulness and remorselessness to happen, particularly to such faithful admirers. The presence of this loathsomeness, and the absence of an awesome reaction, always shakes Eliezer’s confidence in God.

Talking about his own understanding, Wiesel once expressed, “My resentment ascends inside confidence and not outside it.” Eliezer’s battle reflects such an estimation. Just in the most reduced snapshots of his confidence does he walk out on God. In fact, in any event, when Eliezer says that he has abandoned God totally, Wiesel’s steady utilization of strict similitudes undermines what Eliezer says he accepts. Eliezer even alludes to scriptural entries when he denies his confidence. At the point when he fears that he may surrender his dad, he goes to God, and, after his dad’s passing, he communicates lament that there was no strict remembrance. Toward the finish of the book, despite the fact that he has been everlastingly changed by his Holocaust experience, Eliezer develops with his confidence unblemished.