Good Thesis On Faith And Struggle In Wiesel’s Night

If ever there were a man who was experiencing something that should have shaken his faith in God, it was Elie Wiesel during the events in the book Night. The experiences that Wiesel describes in Night are beyond the scope for nearly any human being to experience. Wiesel’s character struggles to keep his faith in a just and righteous God throughout the course of the text, and slowly begins to work through a number of questions regarding the nature of good and evil and the nature of a just and benevolent God.
At the beginning of the story, Wiesel’s character does not doubt his existence in God. To Wiesel, it was just an apparent and overarching truth that God did exist; to the young Wiesel, God’s existence is as real as his need to breath or his own existence. He cannot image a world without a loving and benevolent God (Wiesel and Wiesel). It is a very innocent, trusting individual that the reader meets at the beginning of the novel; Wiesel’s trust in God is so absolute that he does not even begin to question his faith until relatively late in the text.
The next issue that arises for the young Wiesel is triggered when he sees the young boy hanged by the Nazis--in this moment, Wiesel experiences the first seeds of doubt creeping into his mind. He begins to see the world as a deadly, horrible place, and is distraught over the fact that God does not intervene to stop all the horrible things from happening. Unlike the God of the Bible, Wiesel’s God stands by and does nothing as the people of the concentration camps are killed by their captors. Wiesel experiences the true depths of human depravity, and sees no evidence that God is willing to intervene and save the innocent of the world (Wiesel and Wiesel).
Wiesel’s experiences never lead him to question whether or not God exists—this is not an issue that is raised in the text. Instead, Wiesel begins to see the God of the Hebrew Bible and the God that he is experiencing in very different lights: the God of real life, Elie thought, demanded sacrifice and was not compassionate, unlike the God of the Hebrew Bible. The God of the Hebrew Bible may have demanded sacrifice from Abraham, but he spared Abraham’s son; none were spared in the horrific events of the Holocaust. Although the character Elie says multiple times that he will turn his back on God, the fact that he continues to pray indicates that he retains some of his belief in God. When he finally does experience the end of the Holocaust, he has not given up on God, but his foundational worldview is, understandably, quite shaken.
Wiesel’s faith in God does not come out of his experiences in the Holocaust unscathed, but he does retain that faith in God throughout the many experiences that he has. He is completely changed by his experiences in the Holocaust, which is quite understandable; the fact that he is able to retain his faith and his beliefs in the face of all odds is something that speaks to his strength of character and to his ability to heal and move forward.

References

Wiesel, Elie, and Marion Wiesel. Night. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print.