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Essay / Elie Wiesel: A Mystery of True Identity Ted Estess uses to describe the writing of Elie Wiesel. career and, more specifically, what Wiesel incorporates into his books. In this review, Estess expresses her opinion on the characters in Wiesel's popular books, mentioning aspects of these stories like style and tone. The first main point Estess addresses is Wiesel's use of questioning, which he believes is distinct from other styles of questioning: "...the form his questioning takes...for a meaningful abode in the world." .. The form of his questioning... the questioning is an ancient questioning, that of the story” (quoted in Estess 1). What makes Wiesel's questioning styles unique is that readers will understand his stories by questioning the real story and will also understand the meaning of what Wiesel is actually saying through his words. This questioning brings us to the next main point of Wiesel's books, his perspective on God. Wiesel tries to understand his identity and who he really is by questioning God himself. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay As described by Estess, Night doesn't give a real answer about who everyone is, although that question is answered in Wiesel's second major book. , Dawn: “Dawn specifically challenges the idea that the answers will be found within by the solitary individual” (qtd. in Estess 10). In Dawn, the main character realizes what he has become as a person and what he thought was right to do: “But when you lose a friend every day, it doesn't hurt so much. And I had lost a lot of friends in my time... This was the real reason why I followed God to Palestine and became a terrorist; I had no more friends to lose” (Wiesel 170). In this example, the main character reflects how he arrived at his current life from past experiences and shows how he answers his own question about who he is as a person and how he would describe himself. This tactic is closely related to another common mechanism used in Wiesel's writings, the questioning of self-identity. A common style mentioned by Estess and which Wiesel mainly uses in many of his books is to mask characters and show them as "unfinished". Estess believes that masks are more for the dead than the living and that it is an inadequate character model. Wiesel said: “A Jew has no right to disguise himself.” (quoted in Estess 3). Another important detail in Wiesel's writing style is that he focuses on the characters, from feelings and emotions to their progression throughout the story, even though Wiesel is not really concerned with the character. plot or action in a pronounced way. As Estess explains of this focus on characters, "his plotting in the longer stories is extraordinarily loose, providing only an external framework for the exploration of his characters' interiority" (qtd. in Estess 6 ). A character searching for who he really is as a person appears repeatedly in many of Wiesel's writings; for example, in the book Night, the main character talks about his soul and his deepest desires as a person: "I saw us as damned souls wandering in the void, souls condemned to wander in space until 'at the end of time seeking redemption, seeking oblivion, without any hope of findingone or the other” (Wiesel 54). Next, Wiesel's writings show how his characters "move toward action because they wish to acquire a story for their own lives" (qtd. in Estess 6). The reason Wiesel incorporates so much action into his works is because “he experienced the consequences of his inaction so deeply in the Holocaust” (qtd. in Estess 6). This inability to take action against wrongdoing appears throughout Wiesel's memoir, such as in Night, when the main character witnessed one of the Holocaust camp guards beat his father to death. In this situation, the main character wanted to act against this brutality but could not because he was afraid that the guard would beat him savagely as well, leaving him unable to help his father or himself. Additionally, the indifference that Wiesel uses to characterize his characters, primarily in Night, shows how his characters allowed the near destruction of the Jewish population because they could not interfere with such brutality because it was a strong fear factor that invaded them. Furthermore, Wiesel's action allows him to challenge indifference. As Wiesel said of indifference: “We tell the story of the Holocaust to save the world from indifference” (qtd. in Estess 8). “Narrative is Wiesel’s way of questioning the nature of things” (qtd. in Estess 9). A final point made by Estess is that Wiesel's books do a good job of challenging the reader, "a challenge that allows him to interrogate his own perspectives and to modify and broaden his horizon of understanding." (quoted in Estess 9). This means that readers must accept that when reading a work by Wiesel their perspectives may be challenged and they must be willing to change or accept the given perspective. For example, in Wiesel's book And the Sea Is Never Full, Wiesel often questions God and his faith in him. This faith is more directly "attacked" in Night where the main character asks why God does not save him and thus concludes that God died on the cross in the camps. Such deep insights definitely challenge the reader's point of view and the reader must be willing to accept it. In Wiesel's best-known book, Night, Wiesel takes readers through a terrifying journey of what he experienced in the camps and the many struggles he had to overcome. this trip. All the detainees were stripped of their possessions and had to give their entire lives in the Holocaust camps. Through the main character, Wiesel shows how his belief in God changed significantly through his experiences in the camps. At the beginning of the book, the main character wanted to learn Kabbalah and dedicated himself to praying to God every day. The main character and his town's priest read the Zohar over and over again "to discover the very essence of divinity" (Wiesel 23). But after the forced departure to the Holocaust camps, the narrator notices that his convictions change considerably: “For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I hallow his name? The Almighty, the eternal and the terrible Master of the Universe, has chosen to remain silent. What was there to thank him for? » (Wiesel 51). Another important aspect of Night is that Wiesel does not leave fragments of his experience in the camps. Wiesel, in detail, reviews daily experiences while being a camp prisoner with strong emotional descriptions like "The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. No longer feeling the excruciating pain in my foot. cold, nothing. To break rank, I slipped to the side of the road…” (Wiesel 104). He then moves on to descriptions.
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