Megan Brown

Lit & Comp 1

4th
There Are No Words

No matter how long or short some stories need to be heard. Elie Wiesel's story is one of

the millions about a tragic event in history. When Elie was no older than fifteen he was forced to

become an adult, something a child wants to be but then soon regrets. There are no words to

describe the world affected tragedy of the Holocaust, in Elie Wiesel’s Night he uses sentence

length, numbers, and imagery to tell one of the memorable stories of the Holocaust.

Wiesel uses different sentence lengths and variation to get his point across. A style that is

often repeated is the one or two-word sentences. For example, on page 28 there were two words,

‘In Birkenau’. Another sentence or name that most know is the sentence ‘Auschwitz’ (40). These

sentences aren’t only one word but they are names, names to places where millions have died.

This makes the reader think about those settings and the horrible stories that have come from

those places. ‘I was sixteen’. (102) effectively allows the audience to reflect about one’s self at

this age; typically at this age, one worries about getting a job or learning to drive whereas Elie

Wiesel was fighting for his life. As Wiesel has demonstrated, short sentences help reflect and

remember the past.

Another interesting way Elie helps convey the tragic story of the Holocaust was through

the unique use of numbers. Within the confines of this novel, there are no chapter numbers. This

was an interesting choice Wiesel made that may have to do with how numbers had a greater

meaning within the story itself. Numbers are not thought to be associated with life or death; in

the early pages of the book (30), Elie and his father were told to lie about their age, for if one

was too young or too old one would simply die. In the novel, their name was replaced with a
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Lit & Comp 1
4th
number ‘ I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.’ (42) This may cause the reader

to think about one’s own name and how when it is stripped away can destroy an important part of

their identity. Counting the steps towards death is not something someone simply does every day,

but on pages 33 and 34 Elie talks about his steps to death, ‘Twenty more steps’. ‘Ten more steps’.

This shows the audience death was so close that one could see and anticipate their death in less

than twenty steps.

Wiesel has few words so therefore uses strong imagery in these few pages. ‘That night

the soup tasted like corpses’.(65) These powerful seven words allow the reader to try to imagine

why and how a soup, warm and soothing could possibly taste like cold dead corpses. ‘I was

face-to-face with the Angel of Death’(34) This effectively causes the reader to reflect on what it

would be like to be face-to-face with your own death, and how bizarre this truly is. ‘Never shall I

forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent

sky’.(34) It’s hard to think about how millions of innocent people were killed, and among those

people were innocent children. This causes the readers to think about their children, siblings or

friends and the pain one would feel if they were lost. This paints a picture of the smoke and death

that surrounded countless people, it allows the reader to see those very children in smoke.

There are no words to describe the Holocaust, yet Elie Wiesel helps deliver one of the

many painful stories of the Holocaust through his usage of sentence variation, numbers, and

imagery. The sentence variation helps the reader reflect and remember the places where millions

of people died. Numbers help convey to the reader that only a few minutes or a couple of steps

could be a matter of life or death. Elie’s imagery allows one to draw and create the pictures of
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Lit & Comp 1
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true horror that was the Holocaust. Wiesel's story was one of the millions, and in those 115 pages

of Night, he tells an indescribable story of the Holocaust.