Point of View

This story is a first-person, autobiographical account of historical events. The author skillfully details the atrocious brutality of the Holocaust using terse sentence structures and matter-of-fact commentary. He provides candid insight into his personal fears and opinions of the events around him without ever being overly sensational about the cruelty or overly glorifying of the survivors.

Setting

The setting of Night is in the height of WWII. When the reader is first introduced to twelve-year-old Elie, the story is set toward the end of 1941 (going into the spring of 1942) in the village of Sighet, Transylvania in Romania. By the story’s end, Elie is being liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp in April of 1945.

In between the start and finish of the book, Elie spends the majority of his time at Birkenau in Auschwitz and at Buna. The time period and place of the story...