Night-Literary Terminology Project

(Major Grade)

While reading Night, you are to practice active, close reading strategies by looking for different examples of each of the following literary elements/themes:

  1. Symbol
  2. Syntax
  3. Foreshadowing

Themes (one example for each theme) (You must copy/type the theme for each one)

  1. Empathy and the human need for community must be present in order to mourn deaths.
  2. One can protest, love, fear, and question God without contradicting faith.
  3. Hatred is infectious and can take over minds
  4. People will hurt others if put in a situation of survival
  5. Perseverance and faith are key to survival
  6. The Holocaust caused children to lose their innocence.
  1. Mood
  2. Tone shift (shifts/use tone vocabulary words)
  3. Allusions
  4. Characterization
  5. Conflict (identify the type)
  6. Imagery
  7. Metaphor
  8. Connotative meaning (analyze one word in context)

Include an MLA Citation for your copy of Night at the end of the project.

On your own typed paper, you are to list the term/theme in order number the same as this handout, quote the passage, put the page number in internal documentation, and then explain how your quote fits the term/theme.

When the quote you have chosen already includes quotation marks, replace the double (“) quotes with single quotes (‘) and place double quotes on the outside of the passage you have chosen.

Examples on back:

2. Syntax

“Man’s capacity to dig himself in, to secrete a shell, to build around himself a tenuous barrier of defence, even in apparently desperate circumstances, is astonishing and merits a serious study”(Levi 56).

Primo Levi uses a series of infinitive phrases to modify the syntax of this sentence. He does this to elaborate on the idea that a person creates walls of protection around himself when trapped in a place like Auschwitz. The two infinitives are appositives that restate “Man’s capacity to dig himself in”. These infinitive rename the subject of the sentence.

8. Theme - People will hurt others if put in a situation of survival.

“…from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forewards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.

Kuhn is out of his senses. Does not see Beppo the Greek in his bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn?” (Levi 129).

Kuhn is so relieved that he was not “chosen” for the gas chamber that he prays thanking God right next to someone who was “chosen.” Kuhn’s own desire for survival and his thankfulness for the present reprieve prevent him from seeing or caring about the hurt he inflicts on Beppo.

11. Tone shift

“And she would not believe the things I tell her, and I would show her the number on my arm, and then she would believe…

…It is over. The last wagon has passed, and as if the curtain had been raised, the pile of cast-iron supports lies before our eyes. The Kapo on his feet at the pile with a switch in his hand, the wan companions who come and go in pairs” (Levi 44).

This passage shows a shift in tone. While Levi and his group are waiting for a train to pass, he dreams of getting out and talking to an Italian girl. His thoughts and words are nostalgic and peaceful. When the train finally passes, his words, hard and cold like the “cast-iron” beams, change to show his dislike for the Kapo and his whip. The change from nostalgic and peaceful to hard and cold is a tone shift.

Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958.