Stylistic Analysis

In the award winning memoir Night, Eliezer Wiesel describes the horrifying truths about concentration camp life and how he survived his experience in the infamous Birkenau/Auschwitz. Wiesel’s purpose is to instill the dreadful knowledge about the Jewish holocaust in hopes that it won’t repeat, as history tends to do time-to-time. Wiesel changes from a calm like tone with a repetitive structure during chapters 1-5 to the more morbid and disturbing word choice, and a choppy fragment style of chapters 6-9. Wiesel uses this strategy of word choice and tone to emphasize to us just how bad the Jewish holocaust really was.
Wiesel begins his memoir with a calm diction and a repetitive sentence structure that sets the current mood. For example, in the beginning chapters of 1-5 Wiesel uses tranquil words like: “calm”, “reassuring”, “peaceful”, and “smile”(6). to describe his home-town Sighet. Wiesel uses those words to soften up the reader before laying down the cold-hard-truth which improves his message. For instance, Wiesel uses repetition such as: “ Never shall I forget that smoke… Never shall I forget the faces of small children… Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.”(34) He uses this to emphasis the difference between the comely Sighet to the first frightening frantic sight of Birkenau. Also it builds a crescendo to how much worse his experience gets starting from a regular day with a regular boy to a “skeleton starring in the mirror.”
Throughout chapters 6-9 Wiesel starts to shift from a calm word choice and repetitive sentence beginning to a morbid diction and choppy fragmented sentence type. For example, the reassuring diction from paragraphs 1-5 has changed to a horrifying and morbid diction like: “stiffened corpses ”, “death”, “suffocated”(89). Wiesel’s change from a calm diction to a horrific diction really emphasizes his point that camp life was deadly. Also, the structure changes to a more choppy but dramatic style by using fragments like “We came to an abandoned village. Not a living soul. Not a single bark. Houses with gaping windows”. (69) Wiesel uses this choppy fragmented style to show how simple the situation had become to him at this point. He was on his way to another concentration camp, he was surrounded by death, and he himself was dying.
Overall, Wiesel uses chapters 1-5 to set up for his main point, the Jewish holocaust was death, and he definitely shows us this in chapters 6-9 with the change in word choice and sentence structure.