Two-Column Graphic Organizer

Night: Identity
Quotes & MLA Citations Response to EQ & Further Analysis
In the afternoon we were made to line
up with the left sleeve rolled up each
person passed in front of the table. The
three veterans, with needles in their
hands, engraved a number on our left
arms. I became A-7713. After that I had
no other name (39).
Elie renounced his identity by giving up his name. Once his arm was
tattooed with a number, his identity began to crumble. Before arriving to
the concentration camp, his name represented who he was, his religion,
and his family. Within his neighborhood, his name identied him as the
son of an important church member, and that he was a Jew. At the
concentration camp, his name became irrelevant, because he was told
by the SS ofcers that he was no longer important enough to have a full
name. Elie was subjected to be nothing more than just a number;
without a name, and without an identity.
Why, but why should I bless Him?
How could I say to Him: Blessed art
Thou, Eternal, Master of the Universe,
who chose us from among the races to
be tortured day and night, to see our
fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end
in the crematory?I did not fastI no
longer accepted Gods silences (64-65).
From the beginning till the end of the novel, Elies identity was closely
related to his religion. He used have a great passion for his Jewish
practices and believes, but after his imprisonment, his faith in God was
challenged. He described how he slowly began to loose his faith and
challenge religion. His identity became unstable too, because without
religion, he was unable to be the same person he used to be. This
passage proves that Elies identity changed because the concentration
camp and cruelty that he had to live through everyday made him reject
his religion. Thus, challenging his religion also made him alter his identity.
I had not seen myself since the ghetto.
From the depths of the mirror, a corpse
gazed back at me. The look in his eyes,
as they stared int mine, has never left
me (109).
Elies reaction to himself was not just a literal one, but also a metaphor.
He had not seen his reection for more than ve years, and when he
nally did, he could not recognize the person that stared back.
Physically he was unhealthy, weak, and diminishing. The worst part was
that he had also changed interior identity. His identity had changed, and
the way that he viewed life would never be the same. Suffering in the
camp had altered his identity, because he felt that he could not have the
same faith in God after he had seen babies been thrown into the re and
seen how the SS ofcers mistreated the prisoners. He had been
dehumanized, and everyone he had once loved had died. Therefore,
when Elie describes that, the eyes never left me he meant that he will
never forget the injustice that he lived through in the concentration camp
during the Holocaust. It is because of the painful events that he had to
go through that his identity was demolished and changed forever.