Night Blog Post #1

​In Night by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel tries to uses his writing style to promote the feelings in the reader, that he felt during the Holocaust. In my opinion, this works incredibly well. I don't often relate with the characters in a book, but when Elie Wiesel writes “It was there for the taking. An open tomb. A summer sun,” (17), the emotion hits me like a train. The finality of his writing in that way conveys the hopelessness of his situation. In other words, he uses short, decisive statements to to make his writing seem final, and unchangeable, exactly how he felt during the Holocaust. What really struck me after reading phrases like that a few times through, is that most of it isn't even a complete sentence. As a professor at the University of Boston, he must know that what he is writing is grammatically incorrect, yet he writes it, and with good reason too! Another tool Elie Wiesel uses to convey emotion is the simile. Elie Wiesel’s writing is littered with similes, but certainly not in a bad way. “By eight o'clock in the morning, weariness had settled into our veins, our limbs, like molten lead,” (16). When I read this, I know exactly how Elie Wiesel feels in this moment, but had Elie Wiesel said something along the lines of, we were incredibly tired, it would have had a diluted effect. To explain, I wouldn't know how “incredibly tired” would feel, because I don't know to what extent he is tired. However, contrary to the previous, I can easily picture how “limbs, like molten lead” might feel.