Night -- Eli Wiesel the Essay

We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares" (Wiesel, 9).

By far, the darkest development in the life of the author was his gradual emotional and psychological distancing that he experienced with regard to his aged father. The author is tormented by the knowledge (and memory) that he began to wish his for his father's death to relieve himself of the burden of caring for and protecting him. The author represents this through the character of Rabbi Eliahou's son who purposely allows his elderly father to fall behind him on their last death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald in the freezing snow, knowing that the consequence will be his death for failing to keep up with the group on the forced march.

The author eventually stopped responding to his father's calls and from reacting when other prisoners beat him for soiling their bunks. Ultimately, his heart had become completely dark and unable even to mourn his father's death only weeks before liberation of the camp. Describing his reaction to father's death, he writes:

"I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched for it, I might perhaps have found something like -- free at last" (Wiesel, 38).

The theme of darkness captures more than just the plight of the European Jews; it also represents what Wiesel believed at the time to be the darkness of all of humanity and also the darkness of his own capacity for selfishness and insensitivity to his beloved father in the extreme circumstances in which he found himself as a teenage victim…