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Although you might initially be excited to learn that there aren’t many characters to keep track of in Elie Wiesel’s Night, it turns out that the small cast isn’t exactly good news. That’s because in Night, the shrinking character list is a result of systematic murder.

Video Transcription:

I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there aren’t a lot of characters for you to remember in this story. The bad news is the same: There aren’t a lot of characters for you to remember. That’s because, with the exception of Eliezer, all of them are killed at some point during this book.

Eliezer is your main character. In a lot of ways, he’s not so different from you. He’s a teenager who doesn’t think a lot about the future. Naturally, he assumes that life will just go on as it always has.

But Eliezer is a Jew living in Sighet, Transylvania at a time when the German Dictator, Hitler, had set out to exterminate all the Jews. Before Eliezer knows what’s happening, he and his family—his father, Shlomo, who is with him for most of the story, and his mother and sisters, who are most likely dead by the end of Chapter 3—are shipped off to the work camps.

And by the conclusion of the book, everyone Eliezer loves, and everyone he has met along the way—like his friends, the brothers Yossi and Tibi—is either dead or has disappeared.

Eliezer finds himself completely alone, and utterly transformed from the trusting, naïve teenager he was at the beginning of the story. His body is a skeleton he doesn’t even recognize. Worse, his faith, both in God, and in the inherent goodness of human beings, is shattered. Eliezer no longer knows what to believe, or whether there’s anything he can believe in at all.