“What and how they speak may not be as extraordinary as the fact that they speak at all” (qtd in Estess par.1) are the words Ted Estess uses to describe the writing of Elie Wiesel's career and, specifically, what Wiesel incorporates into his books. In this critique, Estess expresses his opinion on the characters in Wiesel's popular books, mentioning aspects of these narratives such as style and tone. The first major point that Estess addresses is Wiesel's use of questions, which he says is distinct from other styles of questioning: "...the form that his questions take...has to dwell significantly in the world…The form of his questioning is ancient: that of story telling” (qtd. in Estess 1). What makes Wiesel's questioning styles unique is that readers will understand his stories by questioning real history and they will also understand the meaning behind what Wiesel is actually saying through his words. These questions lead to the next main point of Wiesel's books, his perspective on God. Wiesel tries to understand his identity and who he truly is by questioning God himself. . Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why should violent video games not be banned"? Get an original essay As described by Estess, Night does not provide the actual answer about his own identity, although this question is answered in the second book. Wiesel's important piece, Dawn: “Dawn challenges the very idea that answers will be found within the solitary individual” (qtd. in Estess 10). In Dawn, the main character realizes what he has become as a person and what he believed was right to do: “But when you lose a friend every day, it doesn't hurt that much. And I had lost many friends in my time… That was the real reason I followed God to Palestine and became a terrorist; I had no more friends to lose” (Wiesel 170). In this example, the main character reflects how he arrived at the current part of his life from past experiences and shows how he answers his own question of what he is as a person and how he would describe himself. This tactic is closely related to another common mechanic used in Wiesel's writings, questioning personal identity. A common style cited by Estess and used predominantly by Wiesel in many of his books is to disguise characters and show them as "unfinished". Estess believes that masks are more for dead people than living ones and this is a poor character model. Wiesel says: “A Jew has no right to wear disguises.” (qtd. in Estess 3). Another important detail of Wiesel's writing style is that he focuses on the characters, from feelings and emotions to their progression throughout the story, even though Wiesel doesn't really care about plot or action to any pronounced degree. As articulated by Estess regarding this focus on characters, "His plotting in the longer stories is remarkably loose, providing only an external framework for the exploration of his characters' interiority" (qtd. in Estess 6). A character searching for who he truly is as a person appears a handful of times in many of Wiesel's writings; for example, in the book Night, the protagonist talks about his soul and what his deepest desires are as a person: "I thought of us as damned souls wandering in the void, souls condemned to wander in space until the end of time at seeks redemption, seeking oblivion, with no hope of finding either” (Wiesel 54). Next, Wiesel's writing shows how his characters “move toward action because they desire to gain a story for their lives” (qtd. in Estess 6). The reason why Wieselincorporates so much action into his works is that “during the Holocaust he so deeply experienced the consequences of failure to act” (qtd. in Estess 6). This inability to act against wrongdoing appears throughout Wiesel's memoirs, such as in Night, when the main character watched one of the guards in the Holocaust camp beat his father to death. In this situation, the main character wanted to act against this brutality but couldn't because he was afraid that the guard would brutally beat him too, leaving the main character unable to help his father or himself. Furthermore, the indifference with which Wiesel characterizes his characters, especially in The Night, shows how his characters allowed the near destruction of the Jewish population because they could not interfere with such brutality as it was a strong fear factor that took hold of them. Furthermore, Wiesel's action allows him to challenge indifference. As Wiesel said about indifference, “We tell the story of the Holocaust to save the world from indifference” (qtd. in Estess 8). “The story is Wiesel's way of investigating the nature of things” (qtd. in Estess 9). A final point that Estess talks about is that Wiesel's books do a good job of challenging the reader, "a challenge to allow his perspectives to be interrogated and his horizon of understanding to be altered and expanded." (qtd. in Estess 9). This means that readers must accept that, when reading a work by Wiesel, their perspectives may be challenged and that they must be willing to change or accept the given perspective. For example, in Wiesel's book And the Sea Is Never Full, Wiesel often questions God and his faith in Him. This faith is most directly “attacked” in Night, where the main character asks why God will not save him and thus concludes that God died on the cross in the fields. Such profound perspectives definitely test the reader's perspective and they must be willing to accept it. In Wiesel's best-known book, The Night, Wiesel takes readers through a terrifying journey of what he experienced in the camps and the many struggles he had to overcome. this trip. All the inmates were stripped of their belongings and had to sacrifice their entire lives in the Holocaust camps. Through the main character, Wiesel shows how his faith in God changed greatly through his experiences in the camps. At the beginning of the book, the main character wanted to learn Kabbalah and was devoted to praying to God every day. The main character and the priest of his town read the Zohar over and over again “to discover the very essence of divinity” (Wiesel 23). But after the forced departure to the Holocaust camps, the narrator discovers that his beliefs have changed significantly: “For the first time I felt anger growing inside me. Why should I hallow His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, has chosen to remain silent. What was there to thank him for?" (Wiesel 51). Another important aspect of the Night is that Wiesel leaves no fragments of his experience in the camps. Wiesel, in detail, traces his daily experiences despite being an inmate in the camp with emotional descriptions strong as “The idea of ​​dying, of ceasing to exist, began to fascinate me. Of no longer feeling the excruciating pain in my cold foot, nothing. (Wiesel 104) He then moves on to descriptions of torture and greed: “The volunteers stripped him and eagerly divided his clothing. “He grabbed him by the head and feet and threw him from the wagon, like a sack of flour” (Wiesel 117). ) Such descriptions and a handful of others give readers an experience.