Night - Part 6 (pages 81-109)

Part 6 – The Importance of Memory (pages 81-109)

Central Question by emphasizing identity, memory, and the importance of witnessing.

Consider how prisoners struggle to maintain their identity under extraordinary conditions:

• After the forced march, the prisoners are crammed into a barracks. That night Juliek plays a fragment of a Beethoven concerto on the violin he has managed to keep the entire time he was at Auschwitz.
What do you think prompts Juliek to play that evening? What does the music mean to Eliezer? To the other prisoners who hear the sounds? To Juliek?

• In this section of the book, Eliezer tells of three fathers and three sons. He speaks of Rabbi Eliahou and his son, of the father whose son killed him for a piece of bread, and finally of his own father and himself. What words does Eliezer use to describe his response to each of the first two stories? How do these stories affect the way he reacts to his father’s illness? To his father’s death?

• What does Eliezer mean when he writes that he feels free after his father’s death? Is he free of responsibility? Or is he free to go under, to drift into death?

• Eliezer later states, “Since my father’s death, nothing mattered to me anymore.” What does he mean by these words? What do they suggest about his struggle to maintain his identity? Think about what it means to describe one’s image as a “corpse contemplating me.”

• In the next to the last sentence in the book, Eliezer says that when he
looks in a mirror after liberation, he sees a corpse contemplating him. He ends the book by stating, “The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” What does that sentence mean?

• Why is it important to Eliezer to remember? To tell you his story?

• How has he tried to keep you from responding to his story the way he and his father once responded to the one told by Moshe the Beadle? How successful has he been? Discuss why Wiesel titled his autobiographical story “Night.”

Consider the bigger picture – Looking at the story as a whole

 Night focuses on a single year in Eliezer’s life. Identify some of the internal and external conflicts he faced that year.

 Compare and contrast your earlier pictures of Eliezer with the way he describes himself at the end of the book. How do your pictures and descriptions help you understand the changes he refers to?

 How did the relationship between Eliezer and his father change in the course of the year on which the book focuses? How do you account for that change?

 What is the metaphorical meaning of the title, Night?


 Why do you think Wiesel tells his story from the first person perspective? If Night were written in the third person, would it be more or less believable? Why do you think Elie Wiesel begins Night with the story of Moshe the Beadle? What lessons does the narrator seem to learn from Moshe’s experiences in telling his own story?

 Write your responses to this book. You might also list questions and comments.