The Night Trilogy
Written by Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy is a collection of three novels, Night, Dawn, and The Accident. In Night, the author gives somewhat autobiographically account of his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. The other novels describe some of the experiences faced by survivors of the camps. Through these three powerful novels, the reader is not only immersed in a first-hand description of life in the concentration camps, but the impact of the camps on individuals and Judaism as a whole.
The works of The Night Trilogy are largely centered around faith and the aftereffects of the Holocaust on it. In Night, the narrator loses his faith in a God of love. However, it is not just doctrinal faith that has shaken, but his faith in the goodness of humanity as well. Dawn and The Accident are narrated by presumably two different men both struggling to find meaning in a life ravished by death. In his article, “Elie Wiesel: Between Hangman and Victim,” Robert Alter explains the development of the three novels. He wrote, “Night, is a terse and terrifying account of the concentration camp experiences that made him an agonized witness to the death of his innocence, his human self-respect, his father, his God. His innocence, of course, was irrevocably destroyed, like his flesh-and-blood father, but what Wiesel has done in the fiction after Night is to try to rediscover grounds for human self-respect, to struggle to imagine a God who is neither dead nor insane” (Alter).
The theme of lost faith is illustrated in Night when Wiesel writes, “Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever…Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams into dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never” (43). In the course of his night at Auschwitz, Eliezer finds himself to be a transformed person. Again he illustrates this point, “I...