The Robbery of "His" Life

When reading the conclusory sentence of Night, "The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me"(115), two words stood out immediately to me: "his" and "he." It seemed surprising that after an entire novel told from the first person, Wiesel refers to himself in the third person. He uses the word "me" at the end of the sentence, however, to reassure readers that he has not merely shifted perspective, that there is something greater at play here. He uses these words to say that all the suffering he endures creates in him a sort of dual personality, a split between the suffering child and the remembering adult. In his Nobel Acceptance speech, Wiesel continues to refer to his younger self in the third person, referring to himself as "boy," "he," or with the word "his" a total of ten times. Wiesel describes a conversation between himself and his younger in which the child asks, "'what have you done with my future, and what have you done with your life?'"(118) Wiesel, once, again differentiates between pronouns. It is the child's future, but the adult's life. Wiesel seems to be saying that all the suffering robbed the child of his future, and that the adult is now living a life not entirely his own. He goes on to say that, "Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately"(120). The simple use of a different pronouns separates Wiesel into two parts and allows him to transition to his final idea: that suffering robs people of their lives, that it takes people's futures out of their own hands, and that, as a result, the goal of our lives should be to fill the voids left in those of others.