Sample Night response (correct)

A Change


Student Name
Mrs. Feller
English 9H
09 October 2006



“I did not move. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, before my very eyes, and I had not flickered an eyelid. I had looked on and said nothing. Yesterday, I should have sunk my nails into the criminal’s flesh. Had I changed so much, then? So quickly? Now remorse began to gnaw at me.” (Chapter 3)

This passage, taken from chapter 3 of Night, signifies yet another change occuring within Elie, the book’s narrator. Wiesel’s use of sentence variety (complete and incomplete, longer and shorter sentences) helps to add variety and further establish the rhythm of the narrator’s speech and thoughts. Wiesel also repeats ideas (e.g. “My father had been struck…I had not flickered an eyelid…I had looked on and said nothing…”) which not only reinforce Elie’s ambivalence and feelings of conflict about the violence perpetrated toward his father, but also the sheer feeling of helplessness all Jews most likely felt during the Holocaust. The words “struck,” “sunk,” “flesh,” “remorse,” and “gnaw” all evoke strong emotions of sadness and vulnerability. (114 words)

Like Frederick Douglass, Elie experiences high points and low points. Douglass sees the horrors of slavery when he first sees his aunt beaten for trivial faults, and Elie sees piles of bodies burned in a mass grave when he first arrives at the concentration camps. Douglass also finds kindness in Sophia, the woman who first teaches him the alphabet. Yet later, he sees how slavery spoils a person’s morality when Sophia’s husband urges her to stop teaching and increase her brutality toward Douglass. Elie, too, sees the Pole Franek as a gentle, kind person, until the evils of the Holocaust cause Franek to become greedy and threaten Elie for his gold crown. Sometimes tragedies which effect large groups of people can cause even the gentlest of people to become harsh and unkind. (132 words)