he is to kill, yet the conflicts around him lead him to search for it. In the final moments before John Dawson’s death Elisha struggles to find this hate and instead can only feels an intense bond with the hostage:“I didn’t hate him at allhat woul, but I wanted to hate him. Td have made it all very easy. Hate-like faith or love or war-justifies everything...but I could not hate him.... The seated victim, the standing executioner-smiling, and understanding each other better than if they were childhood friends. Such are the workings of time....There was harmony between us; my smile answered his; his pity was mine. No human being would ever understand me as he understood me at this hour. Yet I knew that this was solely on account of the roles that were imposed upon us.”(192)The many other themes explored in the two short stories are often similar or comparable, yet the main and underlying theme of each are much more prominent in the story they pertain to. Night’s main theme deals with the narrator’s quest to find and understand God’s role in times of such inhumanity. Eliezer says that the Holocaust “murdered his God,” and he often expresses the belief that God could not exist and permit the existence of the Holocaust. Wiesel seems to be suggesting that the events of the Holocaust prove that faith is a necessary element in human survival, that it preserves man whether or not it is based in reality. Faith, Wiesel seems to say, is a kind of hope, and it is always necessary for the prisoners to maintain hope, in order for them to maintain life. It might further be argued that even when Eliezer claims to abandon God as an abstract idea, he remains incapable of abandoning his attachment to God as an everyday part of his life. He continues to pray to God-as when he prays not to become as cruel as Rabbi Eliahou’s son-and his vocabulary still reflects a kernel of faith in God. The idea is ...
