Our Top 5 Themes in Night-Unfinished

1) The effects of adversity on the human spirit.

a) "From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me."

After so much hardship and adversity, Elie Wiesel is unable to see himself as a really, living person. All he sees is a corpse, he died from the inside out.

b) While the were in the cattle carts being shipped to a new camp, bread was thrown into the carts and the people were fighting for it 'til the death. A man was able to get a large piece and crawl away, having some for himself and for his son. His son then steals all the bread, even the piece already in his father's mouth and ends up killing his father. The adversity causes him to think only of himself and of staying alive. He is even willing to kill his own father to achieve this.

c) When Moshe the Beadle returned after his deportation, "there was no longer any joy in his eyes. He no longer sang. He no longer talked to me of God or the cabbala, but only of what he had seen."





2)The role that self-preservation plays when individuals respond to competing demands.

a) The young man who stole his father's bread and killed him on the cattle cart.

b) Elie struggles with whether or not to give his father his ration, or to take his father's ration for himself.

c) Towards the end, everyone is laying on top of each other, sleeping, Elie has to scratch his way out of a pile of bodies, either dead, alive or dying. He was running out of air and crushing his friend, Juliek.