Elie Wiesel's novel "Night" through the critical lens of Coleridge's poem "The Dungeon".

Samuel Coleridge's poem, "The Dungeon", is a great piece of literature to display the way that the book Night by Elie Wiesel makes a statement on how people become numbed to various environmental factors when they are surrounded by them on a daily basis, most especially those that are horrendous. In his poem, Coleridge ridicules the then-common method of attempting to "straighten out" members of society by placing them in, as could be clearly guessed …

…as a good analytical tool for the novel Night by Elie Wiesel. Both portray how one's surroundings eventually act to make one desensitized towards those factors. In both the poem and the novel, the subject's character is made worse by the exposure to negative elements in their environment as their self-cognition in respect to those elements becomes nearly non-existent, and in doing so proves the theme of this paper and the novel to be true.