A bildungsroman story is one of training, education, or coming of age. It features the young protagonist's development to become a more well-rounded person. Elie Wiesel's memoir Night presents the opposite, an Anti-Bildungsroman, as sixteen-year-old Elie ultimately emerges from the concentration camp an impoverished person. Elie loses his family, loses his faith, suffers physically and is hungry, and will likely face trauma for the rest of his life. Although he begins the story as a functional and healthy member of society, inspired to live, he ends it with nothing. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay A large contributing factor to Elie's negative character development is the loss of his family. From the moment he hears the words "men at the waist, women at the right", he will never see his mother and sister again. During their time together in the camp, he and his father grow closer than ever before. This happens out of necessity, for a reason to live, and their relationship carries them through times that they otherwise could not have survived. However, Elie's father ultimately dies during the death march. After losing him, Elie no longer has any reason to continue living, “nothing mattered to me anymore”. (113). Without his mother and sister, he has no other family to return to. Due to the loss of his family, Elie is left alone in the world and without a reason to live. Growing up, Elie's religion was a defining part of who he was. It inspired him to live and always continue to learn. “Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?" (4). Over the course of the memoir Night, his religion is slowly dissected and demolished by his experiences in the camp. Because Elie's expectations of God were so high, they were destroyed even more easily. Deprived of faith, he remains without passion in life and without hope. After seeing a child hanged and hearing another prisoner wonder where God is, he thinks: "that's where - hanging here on this gallows." able to believe in a God who would allow the horrors he witnesses to happen, and so his main source of joy and inspiration in life dies. “The student of the Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames.” (37) In addition to having lost the spiritual and emotional reasons to live, Elie also experiences great physical suffering, which puts him to the test. In one episode he describes himself as “nothing more than a body. Perhaps even less: one hungry stomach.”(52). The horrible conditions of the camp push the prisoners to abandon their humanity and think only of survival. “We only thought about this. No thoughts of revenge, or parents. Only bread." (115). Elie even becomes dehumanized and survival-oriented enough to resent his father for being weak. “I felt anger at that moment, it wasn't directed at the Kapo, but at my father. Why couldn't he have avoided Idek's wrath?” (54). Elie's physical suffering plays an important role in how the concentration camp shapes and influences him psychologically. The trauma Elie experienced in the concentration camps can never truly be recovered and will likely leave him feeling like an outsider from the mainstream world otherwise. of his life. When, after liberation, he sees himself in the mirror for the first time, he describes himself as "a corpse" (115). The version of him that entered the camp has died and now remains only an empty shell. "I will never forget those moments that murdered mine.