How to Write a Literary Analysis on
Night by Elie Wiesel
Your complete walkthrough for the ENC1102 documented literary analysis assignment — from picking a thesis-worthy topic and tracking down two academic sources, to building a strong argument and formatting your Works Cited page correctly in MLA.
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Get Expert Help →What This Assignment Is Actually Asking You to Do
Write a 600–750 word documented literary analysis of Night by Elie Wiesel. You need a clear thesis, at least three integrated quotes from the memoir, citations from two academic sources (at least one from MDC databases), proper MLA formatting throughout, and a Works Cited page listing a minimum of three total sources.
A literary analysis is not a book report. That distinction matters more than anything else here. You are not summarizing what happened in Night — your professor already knows the memoir. You are making an argument about it. You are picking a specific element (a theme, a symbol, a character transformation, a narrative technique) and arguing a specific claim about what it means and how it works in the text.
The word “documented” in the assignment title means your argument needs to be grounded in outside sources — literary criticism written by scholars, or academic research from relevant fields like psychology or history. Those sources don’t replace your own reading of the text. They support and deepen your argument. Your primary evidence is always the memoir itself. The outside sources add credibility, critical context, or a theoretical lens.
At 600–750 words, this essay is short. That’s actually harder, not easier. You don’t have room to wander. Every sentence needs to do something — introduce a point, support it, connect it to your thesis. The discipline to stay focused is what separates a B paper from an A paper at this length.
The Turnitin and AI Rules — Read These First
Your essay goes through Turnitin. Similarity above 24% is flagged as plagiarism — and that threshold includes your own quoted passages from the memoir, so paraphrase where you can and only quote when the exact wording matters. More importantly: your course uses an AI detector. Papers showing AI use cannot receive a grade. If you use any AI tool to generate sentences, paragraphs, or full drafts, you are putting your grade and potentially your enrollment at risk. Use AI tools for brainstorming if your course allows, but the writing itself must be yours.
Choosing Your Topic: The Decision That Shapes Everything
You have around 18 topic options. The single most useful piece of advice here is this: pick the one you actually have something to say about. Not the one that sounds most impressive, not the easiest one — the one where you finish the prompt and already have a gut reaction or an argument forming.
Look at the prompts carefully. Most of them are asking you to argue a transformation or a message. They’re not asking “what happens?” They’re asking “what does this mean?” and “what is Wiesel arguing through this?” That distinction should guide how you read your chosen topic before you write a single word.
Here’s a quick orientation across the major topic clusters the assignment offers:
Father-Son Relationship
Tracks a transformation across the whole memoir. Needs close reading of early Sighet scenes vs. camp scenes. Strong for students who found that relationship emotionally central.
Faith and God
One of the richest topics in Wiesel scholarship. Lots of literary criticism available. The arc from devout believer to spiritual crisis is clearly documented in the text — quote-finding is manageable.
Symbolism (Night, Fire, Silence)
Works best if you focus on one symbol only. Fire is the most traceable across the text. Night itself is in the title for a reason — Wiesel knew what he was doing with that word.
Identity and Dehumanization
The psychology angle opens a door to non-literary academic sources — sociology or psychology journals on genocide, dehumanization, and group identity. Useful if you want to pull from outside literary criticism.
Witnessing and Testimony
Directly tied to Wiesel’s own stated purpose for writing. Requires engaging with why testimony matters — good fit for students interested in the Holocaust’s historical legacy.
Ethics of Survival / Guilt
More philosophically demanding but rewards careful argumentation. Wiesel doesn’t give easy answers — neither should your thesis. Use specific camp scenes, not generalizations.
A Practical Shortcut for Choosing
Before committing to a topic, spend ten minutes searching for it in an MDC database. If you can find at least two peer-reviewed articles on it within five minutes of searching, the topic is researchable. If you’re struggling to find anything, either your search terms are off, or the topic is a tougher research challenge. Don’t spend 48 hours on an essay only to discover you can’t find sources for your angle.
Topics Best Paired with Psychology or History Sources
Remember — the assignment allows one non-literary academic source. These topics lend themselves especially well to that option:
Psychology-Adjacent Topics
- Dehumanization — psychology of genocide
- Trauma and identity transformation
- Survivor guilt and responsibility
- Moral injury and inhumanity
- Eliezer’s personality transformation
History-Adjacent Topics
- Witnessing, testimony, and Holocaust memory
- The role of silence and complicity
- Conditions at Auschwitz/Buchenwald
- Jewish identity before and during the war
- Forgiveness and post-war reconciliation
Finding Your Two Academic Sources: Where to Look and What Counts
This is where most students either waste hours or cut corners. Both mistakes are avoidable. The assignment is explicit: at least one source must come from the MDC databases. The second can come from Google Scholar or the MDC course guide’s linked criticism books. CliffsNotes, SparkNotes, LitCharts, Wikipedia, and general websites are off the table — completely.
Start at the MDC Course Guide — It’s Already Curated for You
Your course guide at libraryguides.mdc.edu/ENC1102/Night links directly to two books of literary criticism on Night. These books contain multiple articles and essays — each one is a citable academic source. You cannot list the whole book as your source. Find the specific article or chapter within the book that supports your thesis, and cite only that piece. This is often the fastest path to your MDC-database requirement because these resources are pre-approved and directly relevant.
Search MDC Databases Directly
Log into the MDC library portal with your student credentials. The databases most useful for this assignment are Literature Resource Center (geared toward literary criticism — searches directly by author and work), JSTOR (peer-reviewed humanities journals going back decades — Wiesel has been written about since the 1960s), and Academic Search Complete (broader academic coverage, useful if you want a psychology or history source). Search using terms like: “Elie Wiesel Night”, “Night memoir Holocaust testimony”, “Wiesel faith God concentration camp”, or whatever fits your specific topic. Filter results to peer-reviewed only.
If a full-text article isn’t available, use the library’s interlibrary loan service or look for the same article on JSTOR or Google Scholar. Don’t abandon a promising article just because you hit a paywall on one platform.
Use Google Scholar for Your Second Source
Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) is free and searches peer-reviewed academic articles, books, and conference papers. The same search terms that work in MDC databases work here. Once you find an article, check whether it’s published in a named academic journal — that’s your signal it’s peer-reviewed and academically credible. If it’s just a personal blog post or a course website, it doesn’t count. Look for the journal name, volume, issue, and year of publication before you commit to using a source.
For psychology-adjacent topics specifically, databases like PsycINFO or PubMed (also accessible through MDC) offer research on trauma, genocide psychology, and survivor testimony that pairs powerfully with literary analysis.
Verify It’s Actually Academic Before You Use It
A quick checklist: Does it have an author with academic credentials? Is it published in a named journal or by an academic press (not a vanity publisher)? Does it have citations and a bibliography? If yes to all three — it’s academic. If any of those are unclear or absent, skip it and find something cleaner. Your grade depends on the quality of your sources, not just their existence.
Academic Databases Worth Knowing for This Assignment
Literature Resource Center
Best for literary criticism on specific works and authors. Start here for Night-specific articles.
JSTOR
Deep archive of humanities journals. Excellent for Wiesel scholarship, Holocaust studies, and testimony theory.
Academic Search Complete
Broad coverage. Useful when you need psychology, history, or sociology sources alongside literary criticism.
MLA International Bibliography
Indexes literary scholarship specifically. Every result is academic. Pairs well with Literature Resource Center.
PsycINFO
Best for trauma, identity, and genocide psychology sources if your topic takes a psychological angle.
Google Scholar
Free, broad, and fast. Use for your second source or to find the full text of articles you locate in MDC databases.
The Assignment Is Explicit on This: No Non-Academic Sources
The rubric will dock you for using CliffsNotes, SparkNotes, LitCharts, Wikipedia, or general educational websites — even if they seem informative. You will be marked as missing a required source and cannot receive full credit. If you’re unsure whether a source qualifies, email your professor before submitting, or check with an MDC librarian. They are not there to judge you — they exist specifically to help you find the right sources.
Building a Thesis That Actually Works
Your thesis is the engine of this essay. Everything — your topic sentences, your quote choices, your use of outside sources — serves it. A weak thesis produces a weak essay no matter how good the writing is around it. A strong thesis makes the rest of the paper click into place.
Here’s the core rule for literary analysis theses: your thesis must be arguable, not obvious. “Elie Wiesel suffered greatly in the concentration camps” is not a thesis — it’s a fact no one would dispute. “Wiesel’s relationship with his father becomes his only remaining source of moral purpose in the camps, and its collapse signals his final break with the person he was before deportation” — that’s a thesis. Someone could disagree with it. You have to prove it. That’s the point.
A literary analysis thesis doesn’t describe the text. It interprets it. You’re not telling your reader what happens — you’re telling them what it means and why that meaning matters.
— Standard expectation in ENC1102 literary analysis coursesWhat a Strong Thesis for Night Looks Like
| Topic | Weak Thesis (Avoid) | Stronger Thesis (Aim For) |
|---|---|---|
| Faith and God | Eliezer’s faith changes throughout Night. | Wiesel documents not the loss of God but the loss of a God who responds — Eliezer’s faith collapses not in doubt but in silence, which the memoir frames as a greater wound than denial. |
| Symbolism of Night/Fire | Wiesel uses the symbol of fire throughout the memoir. | Fire operates in Night as a marker of threshold: it appears whenever Eliezer crosses from one version of himself into another, signaling not destruction alone but irreversible transformation. |
| Dehumanization | The Nazis dehumanized Jewish prisoners in the camps. | Wiesel reveals dehumanization as a process rather than an event — one that required Jewish prisoners to enact it against each other before the Nazis needed to act at all, implicating the system rather than condemning individuals. |
| Witnessing and Testimony | Wiesel wrote Night to tell people what happened. | Night positions the act of bearing witness not as historical duty but as the only available form of justice when institutional justice has failed — Wiesel’s testimony is framed less as a record than as an indictment. |
Notice what the stronger theses do that the weaker ones don’t: they say something specific about how the text works, not just what it contains. They make a claim someone could push back on. They point toward what the essay will prove, not just what it will discuss. Aim for that level of specificity before you write your first body paragraph.
Placement and Phrasing
The assignment recommends placing your thesis as the last sentence of your introduction for clarity — follow that guidance. Avoid thesis phrasing like “In this essay, I will argue…” or “This paper will examine…” — those are announcements, not arguments. State the claim directly. “Wiesel’s memoir argues X through Y” is cleaner and stronger than “I am going to argue that Wiesel’s memoir argues X through Y.”
Essay Structure: How to Build Your 600–750 Word Argument
Six hundred to 750 words is roughly two to three double-spaced pages. That’s tight. You’re not going to cover everything — and you shouldn’t try to. Your job is to prove one focused claim with specific evidence. Every part of this essay needs to pull in the same direction.
~80–100 words
~120–150 words
~120–150 words
~120–150 words
~70–90 words
Word Count Strategy
At 600–750 words for the body of the essay, you have roughly 80–100 words for an introduction, 80–100 for a conclusion, and about 420–550 for three body paragraphs. That’s 140–180 words per body paragraph — enough for a topic sentence, one integrated quote with analysis, and a connection sentence. Be disciplined. Don’t spend 200 words on background and only 50 on analysis in a single paragraph.
Integrating Quotes from Night: Three Quotes, Done Right
The assignment requires at least three quotes from the memoir. These are not decorations — they are the primary evidence for your argument. Choose quotes that are specific, surprising, or compressed. A quote that says exactly what you’re arguing is only useful if your analysis unpacks something in it the reader might not immediately see.
Avoid the most common quoting mistake in literary analysis: the “drop and abandon.” That’s when students paste in a quote and move on without explaining it. Quote integration works in three parts: signal phrase, the quote itself, and analysis. Every time. Like this:
Wiesel captures the collapse of Eliezer’s moral world in a single, devastating sentence when he writes, “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever” (34). The word “forever” is doing significant work here — it is not a temporary crisis Wiesel is describing, but an annihilation.
— Example of properly integrated and analyzed quotationSignal phrase first — tells the reader who is speaking and in what context. Then the quote. Then your analysis — what does this quote show? What specific word, image, or construction makes your point? Don’t write “This shows that…” as a reflex. Get specific about what the quote actually does.
For page numbers: use the edition in your course. The 2006 Hill and Wang edition translated by Marion Wiesel is most common. Your in-text citation looks like this: (Wiesel 34). If you’re using a different edition, use the page numbers from that edition consistently throughout.
Where to Find the Best Quotes for Each Major Topic
- Faith and God: The Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur sections; the scene where Eliezer watches a child hang on the gallows
- Father-son relationship: Early Sighet scenes; Eliezer’s reaction to his father’s beating; the death of his father at Buchenwald
- Dehumanization: The cattle car sequence; the tattooing; the descriptions of the Kapos and the soup episode
- Symbolism of fire/night: The opening chimney image; Madame Schächter’s visions; Eliezer’s first night at Birkenau
- Identity: The final mirror scene; the moment Eliezer is given a number instead of a name
- Witnessing: The preface; Moshe the Beadle’s return; the final lines of the memoir
MLA Format: What the Assignment Requires
MLA (Modern Language Association) formatting is standard for English and humanities courses. The assignment requires it throughout — the heading, the in-text citations, and the Works Cited page. If you’ve used APA before, the differences are not massive but they matter, and professors notice them.
Heading and Page Setup
Top-left corner, double-spaced, no title page: your name, your professor’s name, the course name and section, and the date. Centered title below the heading (not bolded, not in quotes, not underlined — just regular formatting unless you include a work’s title in your essay title, in which case italicize only that). One-inch margins all around, Times New Roman 12-point, double-spaced. Page numbers in the top-right header: your last name and the page number (e.g., Smith 1).
In-Text Citations
For quotes from Night: (Wiesel page number) — example: (Wiesel 65). No “p.” or “pg.” — just the number. The period goes after the closing parenthesis, not inside the quotation marks. For quotes from your academic sources: (Author’s last name page number). If the source has no page number (common with online articles), use the author’s last name alone or a shortened title.
Works Cited Page
Minimum three entries: the memoir plus your two academic sources. Alphabetized by the first word of each entry (usually the author’s last name). Hanging indent format — first line flush left, subsequent lines indented half an inch. The page is titled “Works Cited” (not “References,” not “Bibliography”) centered at the top.
| Source Type | MLA 9th Edition Format |
|---|---|
| The Memoir (Night) | Wiesel, Elie. Night. Translated by Marion Wiesel, Hill and Wang, 2006. |
| Journal Article (Print) | Last, First. “Article Title.” Journal Name, vol. #, no. #, Year, pp. ##–##. |
| Journal Article (Online/Database) | Last, First. “Article Title.” Journal Name, vol. #, no. #, Year, pp. ##–##. Database Name, doi or URL. |
| Chapter in Edited Book | Last, First. “Chapter Title.” Book Title, edited by Editor Name, Publisher, Year, pp. ##–##. |
The most reliable free resource for MLA templates is the Purdue OWL MLA guide (owl.purdue.edu). It covers every source type with examples. Bookmark it. Use it every time you’re unsure about a citation format.
MLA 8th vs. 9th Edition — Use 9th
If you’ve taken English courses before, you may have learned MLA 8th edition. The differences between 8th and 9th are minor but real — 9th edition reintroduces edition numbers in some formats and refines URL guidelines. Your course is current, so default to MLA 9th unless your professor says otherwise. The Purdue OWL has updated to MLA 9th as well.
Mistakes That Cost Marks — and How to Avoid Them
Writing a Thesis That Describes Instead of Argues
“Night shows how the Holocaust affected Jewish families” is description. “Wiesel’s depiction of Eliezer’s relationship with his father argues that survival without connection is not survival at all, but a living death” — that’s a claim you can prove. Check your thesis: can a reasonable person disagree with it? If not, it’s not a thesis.
Summarizing the Plot Instead of Analyzing It
Body paragraphs that spend most of their words retelling what happened in the memoir are not analysis. Your professor knows the memoir. You’re not informing them of events — you’re arguing what those events mean and how Wiesel constructs them. Every time you catch yourself writing “And then Eliezer…,” ask yourself: so what? What does this moment reveal, argue, or show about your thesis?
Using Sources as Decoration Rather Than Argument
Dropping a sentence from a scholarly article into your essay and moving on is not citation — it’s plagiarism with a footnote. Your outside sources need to be integrated into your argument: introduce what the scholar says, explain how it supports or extends your point, and connect it explicitly back to your thesis. The source is there to deepen your analysis, not substitute for it.
Trying to Cover Too Much
At 600–750 words, you cannot analyze three symbols, two themes, and a character arc. Pick one focused argument and go deep. Students who try to cover everything produce thin, underdeveloped essays. Students who commit to one specific claim and prove it with close textual evidence consistently produce stronger papers — even if the topic seems narrow.
Forgetting the Works Cited Page or Formatting It Wrong
This is an easy place to lose points for mechanical reasons unrelated to your actual argument. The Works Cited page must list a minimum of three sources. It must use hanging indent format. It must be alphabetized. It must use MLA 9th edition formatting for each entry. Build it as you write — don’t add it at the last minute.
Using AI to Write the Essay
The course runs AI detection on submissions. Papers that show AI-generated content cannot receive a grade. If you’re stuck, the MDC Writing Centers offer in-person and online help. Your professor has office hours. Those are the tools available to you. Using AI to generate your essay text is not a workaround — it’s an academic integrity violation with real consequences for your grade and your enrollment.
FAQs: Answering What Students Ask Most
The Short Version: What to Do Next
Pick your topic before you do anything else. Open your MDC library portal and spend 15 minutes searching for sources on that topic. If you find two usable academic sources quickly, you’ve made the right choice. If you’re struggling, try a different angle on the same topic or switch topics — don’t force a search that isn’t working.
Then build your thesis before you write a word of the essay. A specific, arguable claim about what Wiesel’s memoir does and means is the foundation everything else rests on. The structure follows naturally from the thesis — each body paragraph proves one piece of it, with a quote from Night as your primary evidence and your academic sources to support and contextualize your reading.
MLA formatting is not optional, and neither are the academic sources. These are not minor requirements — they are graded dimensions of the rubric. The Purdue OWL and the MDC librarians are both free resources that make both of those requirements straightforward. Use them.
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