Over the course of history, violence among man has shaped the world in which we live today. Many events of mans inhumanity to man influence the lives of authors and therefore their literature. According to Ellen Glasgow "Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted." One such example of this is the Holocaust, an event which changed the lives of countless people and has been the inspiration of so many authors. Elie Wiesel based his memoir Night on his experiences of the Holocaust and used symbolism to portray not only the violence that was inflicted on the prisoners by the Nazis, but the violence the prisoners inflicted on each other.

In the spring of 1944, Eliezer (a slightly fictionalized version of Wiesel) along with his family and others Jews from his town of Sighet in Hungary were herded into cattle cars and sent to...