Topic > Elements of Postmodernism in the Night by Elie Wiesel

Imagine being torn away from your home and family and given only the bare minimum to survive. This is how Elie Wiesel felt when he was only 12 years old. This book was written by Elie Wiesel and explains all the situations he faced while growing up while the war was going on. He lived in Sighet, which was soon overrun by the Nazis and people were taken to a concentration camp on cattle trailers. On their first night there Elie Wiesel and his family witnessed infants and children being thrown into fire, as well as beating and placing number tattoos on people's skin so that they would lose their identity and become just a number. There many of them died, but Elie Wiesel was one of the lucky ones to survive. Elie Wiesel is a master of postmodernism and has demonstrated expertise in the areas of maximalism, paranoia, and fragmentation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay I believe this book greatly represents the element of maximalism because it explains so many details about how everything happened. This book is made for details and constantly explains everything to you. This book describes much of the outside world and what it would be like if the reader were there. For example, he writes: “Several days passed. Several weeks. Several months. Life was back to normal. A wind of calm and reassurance blew through our homes. The traders did good business, the students lived buried in their books and the children played in the streets”. The author explained what life was like after the foreign Jews were forgotten after taking them away from their homes. Instead of keeping it simple, he went into detail about how everything went back to calm, students went back to school, and everything was back to normal. Another example is when the author states: “I hadn't had time to think, but I already felt the pressure of my father's hand: we were alone. For a split second I glimpsed my mother and sisters walking away to the right. I saw them disappear into the distance. I was separating from my mother and Tzipora forever. I kept walking." This describes a lot of how he felt. He was scared and felt alone, he let you know every little bit of how he felt even his father holding his hand. Night by Elie Wiesel is full of the element of paranoia. Elie Wiesel enters and exits several concentration camps only because he is told he must. Hitler is the leader, and it's chaos because no one knows exactly what's going on. One of the lines in the book read: “Fire! I can see a fire! I can see a fire! There was a moment of panic. Who was that who had shouted? It was Mrs. Schachter. Standing in the center of the wagon, in the pale light from the windows, he looked like a withered tree in a cornfield. He pointed his arm towards the window, screaming." This happened while they were all crowded into a wagon, without food or water, for several days. Some people went crazy and saw things and she was one of them. They could barely see out the windows. All the people in the wagon were terrified even just thinking that they would all burn to death. Another example of the paranoia element is when he states in the book, “We didn't know which side was better, right or left.” “Not far from us, flames were rising from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A truck stopped at the pit and delivered its load: small children. Children! Yes, I saw it, I saw it with my own eyes. At first they tried to understand which side was better because they were dividing the families and in the end when they went down an alley they saw some children.