Night Essay | Critical Essay #2

Night Critical Essay #2

A discussion of Wiesel's eloquent narrative as a means of understanding history and human meaning.

What follows is an attempt to study the ways in which a traumatic historical experience shapes narrative in a powerful example of this genre, Eli Wiesel's Night. It is my conviction that in groping toward formal and literary understanding of such texts, we move closer to the human meanings that the violent world we live in has all but erased.

To render historical horror is to render, by definition, that which exceeds rendering, it projects pain for which there is no solace, no larger consolation, no redemptive possibility. The implications, both formal and aesthetic, for such a rendering are critical. The great tragedies negotiate exactly such a balance. King Lear's terrible journey from blindness to insight brings him reunion with loyal Cordelia even as he loses her and the restoration of the Kingdom is not...
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