Crystal Weissenberger

In all the numerous reviews of Defoe’s novel, most fail to mention Defoe’s total lack of empathy for his fellow human beings, his conceit, his arrogance, and his sense of entitlement (along with several more personal flaws). Specifically, they fail to mention Crusoe’s likelihood of having a mental disorder: schizophrenia. Crusoe displays several symptoms of schizophrenia in Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, such as social isolation and withdrawal, marked paranoia, hallucinations, a reliance on drugs and/or alcohol (to self-medicate), and a total lack of empathy.

In examining several of Greenblatt’s articles, reviews, and books, his use of Judaism and his Jewish heritage appear to be an exploitive way for him to make a relationship between Greenblatt himself and the past. Indeed, Greenblatt’s use of his Jewish heritage and examples concerning other Jews (both historical and literary) and Judaism are actually illustrations of Greenblatt’s own self-fashioning according to the ten criteria he listed in his acclaimed 1980 book Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare.

There is much academic discussion concerning Wiesel’s title and the repeated references throughout his chronicle to things happening in the “night.” Indeed, the many voices of the Jews who have proffered their recollections repeat this analogy. Some of these accounts are about the crimes and violence during the Holocaust that literally happened during the night-time hours, but at other times, like Wiesel, the night means something more – something terrible and akin to nightmares. This is an exploration into that theme: night. Elie Wiesel’s Night is about literal happenings and figurative reactions to them. How do they compare to the memories of other survivors accounts of atrocities occurring in the night, and what were the actions initiated by the Nazis that caused this intense fear of the night? This will be an exploration into the past of the Jewish genocide; a genocide that nearly exterminated an entire race (and religion) from our world, and how the darkest hours of our days were used by the Nazis to ingrain in the survivors of the Holocaust memories of nights filled with brutality, fear, and hopelessness – the night in which Elie Wiesel writes in his own narrative, Night.