If the video doesn’t load please try refreshing the page. If the problem persists make sure you have the latest version of the Flash player or watch the videos on our RecAPP iPhone and iPod application.

No, you’re not off the hook. Just because Elie Wiesel’s Night is an autobiography doesn’t mean that this book doesn’t have symbols. Fortunately for you, Wiesel gave his main symbol away just by penning the title of his story. That’s right: Night.

Video Transcription:

I know this book isn’t fiction. But just because Wiesel’s story is an autobiography doesn’t mean there aren’t symbols. Don’t worry, though. The most important symbol in this story appears right in the book’s title: Night.

Do you think it’s a coincidence that night falls in Chapter 1 just as the Jews are about to discover their fate—that the Nazis are shipping them out of the ghetto to who-knows-where?

Darkness makes anyone feel afraid. But in this book, night doesn’t just symbolize fear. Wiesel mentions the presence of night whenever the suffering is at its most extreme. So night symbolizes suffering, but it also symbolizes a world without God.

OK, that may sound like a bit of a leap, but keep in mind that this is a story built on a foundation of faith. And in the Bible, God’s first act in the story of creation is to create light—and to divide the light from the darkness. In other words, God gets rid of the darkness and makes His presence known.

That’s why, in this story, night, or darkness, represents the absence of God. It’s not just suffering that Eliezer experiences when he and the other prisoners begin their horrible run to Buna. (That’s at the beginning of Chapter 6, when the night is “pitch-black.”) It’s also a feeling that night has fallen because God has deserted them and they are utterly alone.