Introduction
The relationships between a father and a son usually compose in early childhood. However, there are families where father-son love is hidden too deep in their souls that they are unable to see it until something bad happens and only the support of the closest people may help. Reading Elie Wiesel’s Night, the relationships between the author and is father are presented in detail, moreover, the evolution of those relationships is sown from the cold relative feeling up to the most sincere and the most powerful father-son feeling.
Relationship between Eliezer and his Father
At the very beginning of a story, before the author’s experience at the Nazi death camps, the relationships between Elie and his father are distant. These people seem to be strangers to each other, and like the author notices, his father is “more concerned with others than with his own family” (Wiesel 2). Being a leader of a Jewish community, Wiesel’s father spends much time on social affairs without thinking about his family.
Elie also does not pay much attention to his father being aware of his close location. However, when Wiesel’s family is brought to Birkenau and they the father and the son are separated from the mother and three their daughters, Elie’s greatest fear becomes the loss of his father. The understanding that the separation is possible makes these two people become affected by each other more than ever before.
When a real disaster happens, Elie understands how close he is to his father and how he is afraid of loosing him. When Chlomo, Elie’s father is beaten, Elie is frightened that “anger he feels at the moment is directed… against [his] father” (Wiesel 37). From this time the care of the son over a father increases.
Many scholars and critics have noticed a close tension between a father and a son, especially when a father became weak. Being together, they are a family, stronger and more powerful (Sternlicht 34). Remembering the situation when Elie comes to wish his father a happy New Year, they sit together in silence and Elie is sure that they have “never understood one another so clearly” (Wiesel 65) as they did at that moment.
Bloom is sure that even though Elie’s faith in God is destroyed, his “experience of the past seemingly forever silenced” and the only his “existence that has given him the strength to continue, his last vestige of humanity, has been his relationship with his father” (Bloom 157).
The death of his father makes Elie indifferent to all other things. Elie has already lost the faith in God, nothing else interests him. Even the discussion in the story lacks details as it is not interesting for the author any more, he has lost the most loved person in his life. During the disease, Elie spent much time taking care of his father and the death of this person might make him live easier, however, this was wrong.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it should be stated that the relationships between the father and the son were developing from the absence of those relationships to close affection and devotion. It is difficult to imagine the more tender and loving feelings than they were between the son and the father.
It is notable to understand that the harder the life was, the closer and closer the father and the son became. Such situation is easy for explanation, as when people appear in tough situations they need a person who can support them. The father and his son were those people who managed to support each other during hard times.
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. Elie Wiesel’s Night. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2001. Print.
Sternlicht, Sanford V. Student Companion to Elie Wiesel. New York: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003. Print.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Print