Literary critic Ruth Franklin writes that "Night"s impact stems from its minimalist construction. The 1954 Yiddish manuscript, at 862 pages, was a long and angry historical work. In preparing the Yiddish and then the French editions, Wiesel's editors pruned mercilessly. Franklin argues that the power of the narrative was achieved at the cost of literal truth, and that to insist that the work is purely factual is to ignore its literary sophistication. Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer argues similarly that Wiesel evokes, rather than describes: "Wiesel's account is ballasted with the freight of fiction: scenic organization, characterization through dialogue, periodic climaxes, elimination of superfluous or repetitive episodes, and especially an ability to arouse the empathy of his readers, which is an elusive ideal of the writer bound by fidelity to fact."