The Elements of Postmodernism in Night by Elie Wiesel

Imagine being ripped away from your home and family, and only given the bare minimum to survive. This is how Elie Wiesel felt when he was just 12 years old. This book was written by Elie Wiesel and it explains all of his situations he had to go through during his time growing up when the war was happening. He lived in Sighet, which was soon invaded by the Nazi’s and the people were taken on cattle trailers to a concentration camp. The first night there Elie Wiesel and his family witnessed babies and children being thrown into a fire, along with beating and putting number tattoos on peoples skin so they lose their identity and become just a number. There, many of them died but Elie Wiesel was one of the lucky ones that lived through it. Elie Wiesel is a master of postmodernism and displayed proficiency in the areas of maximalism, paranoia, and fragmentation.

I believe that this book represents the element of maximalism greatly because it explains so much detail on how everything happened. This book is made for detail and is constantly explaining everything to you. This book describes a lot of the outside world and how it would look like if the reader was there. For example he writes, “Several days passed. Several weeks. Several months. Life had returned to normal. A wind of calmness and reassurance blew through our houses. The traders were doing good business, the students lived buried in their books, and the children played in the streets.” The author was explaining how life was like after the foreign Jews were forgotten about after they took them first from their homes. Instead of keeping it simple he went into detail about how it was calm, students went back to school, and everything went back to normal. Another example is when the author stated, “I had not had time to think, but already I felt the pressure of my father’s hand: we were alone. For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and my sisters moving away to the right. I saw them disappear into the distance. I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever. I went on walking.” This describes so much of how he was feeling. He was scared and felt alone, he let you know every little part of how he was feeling even his father gripping onto his hand.

Night by Elie Wiesel is full of the element paranoia. Elie Wiesel is in and out different concentration camps only because he is told he has to. Hitler is the leader, and it is chaos because no one knows exactly what is going on. One of the lines from the book read, “Fire! I can see a fire! I can see a fire! There was a moment’s panic. Who was it who had cried out? It was Madame Schachter. Standing in the middle of the wagon, in the pale light from the windows, she looked like a withered tree in a cornfield. She pointed her arm toward the window, screaming.” This happened while they were all piled in a wagon with no food or water, for several days. Some people went crazy and saw things and she was one of them. They could barely see out of the windows. All the people in the wagon were terrified to even think they were all going to burn to death. Another example of the element paranoia is when he stated in the book, “We did not know which was the better side, right or left”. “Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load-little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it-saw it with my own eyes.” At first they were trying to figure out which side was better because they split families up and eventually when they went down a lane they saw babies that burned. You can just imagine the chaos going on with everyone during that time, and everything that is going on in their head when they saw this.

Fragmentation is the last element of postmodernism in the book. This book has a lot of this element more towards the end because he looks back on to what happened. For example he wrote, “They didn’t give us anything...they said that if we were ill we should die soon anyway and it would be a pity to waste the food.” During this he is telling his father what has happened since they were split apart. He flashed back to what they had told him when he was hungry. Another time he was explaining what had happened in his past at the concentration camps what when he wrote, “These were terrible days. We received more blows than food; we were crushed with work. And three days after he had gone we forgot to say the Kaddish.” These are the reasons why this book represents fragmentation.

In the book Night Elie Wiesel displayed all of the elements of postmodernism that I listed in this essay. It was maximalism because of all the description that he wrote. Paranoia was another element because of all the fear that he had during this time of war. The last element was fragmentation because of all the memories he had from what happened after it was all over and he was free. Elie Wiesel is a master of postmodernism and displayed proficiency in the areas of maximalism, paranoia, and fragmentation.