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Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald, Elie became very sick from some form of poisoning. He was transferred to a hospital and spent two weeks battling between life and death. Wiesel said the quote above after seeing himself for the first time in the mirror after the Holocaust. The last lines of this quote leave the reader with a sense of hopelessness. Eliezer views himself as dead, innocent dead, humanity dead, God dead. Shortly after Wiesel was liberated, they didn't fully realize that he survived the Holocaust. When he looked into the mirror, he didn't see himself as a person who was now free. Instead, he saw how the mirror reflected him as a dead corpse, just like the ones he saw at the camps. In this quote, Wiesel uses many literary devices to emphasize some aspects of it.
Elie uses a metaphor to describe his current state physically and mentally “ a corpse was contemplating me ”. He compares himself to a corpse because of the lack of food in his body, but also because of the death of his internal behind. He saw himself as dead, God as dead, humanity as dead, and his innocence as dead. Also, he uses imagery to create a powerful picture in the mind of the reader. As readers, we are able to create a mental picture of the horrendous monstrosity he saw in the glass. Furthermore, Wiesel uses descriptive language within the quote to emphasize tone and mood. The words depth, corpse, contemplating, and never let me show the intensity of the moment.
These words give an eerie and depressing feeling to this section of the book. This quote represents the change in Wiesel's identity. The faithful, strongly religious, joyful, hopeful, and curious boy is now dead with all the other Jews. What remains of him is the carcass he saw in the mirror. The unimaginable horrors that Elie witnessed while being held at the camp killed part of him. His spirit had been stomped on, yet there is still a part of Elie that is still there, buried deep inside. He will never be the same, never. Though liberated physically, the presence of death and the horrors Eliezer experienced remain with him. He is free physically but is still confined mentally. At the end of the novel, he sees only an “image” of himself because he can no longer see the person he used to be. The longer they remained in camps, the more they were reduced to a mere physical presence, losing themselves to their survival instinct, and eventually becoming simply hungry, nearly dead bodies. Throughout the novel, Wiesel uses the characters’ eyes as a symbol of one’s soul but also the changes in faith endured by those individuals. Earlier in the novel, Elie describes Moshe the Beadles’ eyes after he escaped from the Nazis.
“Moshe was not the same. The joy in his eyes was gone”. The look in the character's eye is s symbol of their identity. Therefore, how he views himself at the memoir’s end demonstrates that he, like other personalities in the novel, has experienced a permanent change. In conclusion, the end of the novel leaves us with many questions. It makes us wonder how he was able to survive and how he was able to overcome this appalling challenge. I find it extremely inspiring that he had the courage to write an entire novel about it. He moved through it and was able to find hope in humanity again. Finally, Elie rediscovered his faith and found that there was still true compassion in this world. He saw the most atrocious actions and evil hearts, yet he had the resilience to forgive and to find good in humanity again.
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