Elie Wiesel, who grew up in Europe during the Nazi Holocaust, used personal feelings that he had as a child to sculpt Elisha’s character, a character that was constantly lost and confused much like himself. When he then set Elisha against the post World War II problem of the Jews trying to win back Palestine from the British, he created a book that, as one critic put it, "presents an imagined event, the destruction of a fictional town in Central Europe, and endows it with the destiny, pain and irony of historical reality". Once again, the irony that is spoken of is the change of Elisha’s role from victim to killer. And it was this change of roles that broke him away from the murdered Jewish population and left him with the post war Jews who’s intentions were tainted with thoughts of revenge. This, then, represented the pain as it truly was a dark time for Jews who underwent a period of unbridled chaos and rage that never got them anywhere. And because Elisha was caught in the middle of this disorder and because of his young age, he was set up for being broken down in a tough situation, which is what ultimately happened.
The values that Elisha’s parents and the Jewish faith had taught him, which told him that it was wrong to kill no matter what the cause, had forced too much guilt onto him to be able to kill John Dawson without knowing him. Thus, he went into the prisoner’s cell in search for something about John Dawson that he could loathe. That something, he thought, would be justification enough to kill, or at least that is what he had wanted to believe. However, what he found in the British captain was that he was an amiable man who loved his son which made Elisha’s job all that more difficult. And so as he raised the gun to John Dawson’s head, he realized that what he was doing was wrong. Nevertheless, it was too late to turn back and so he became a murderer. But not only had he murdered Dawson, but he had murdered himself by abandoning his Jewish morals.