Compare and contrast the theme of monsters in Night and Lord of the Flies.

In both texts, we see the monstrous side of humans, what happens to people when they lose their humanity.
In the Preface to Night, Wiesel discusses the way in which "to be inhuman was human" and "disciplined, educated men in uniform came to kill" innocent men, women, and children. He describes the "darkest zone of man," which is too horrible for anyone who has not witnessed it to imagine. He describes the head of one concentration camp as "the notorious sadistic monster of Buchenwald." Elie watches his father beaten by these human men turned monsters.
These monstrous men are not fiction, however, as the monstrous boys are in Lord of the Flies. Though the boys fear some unnamed, unseen beast in the jungle, it is really their own monstrous natures they ought to fear. They are the ones who overlook the disappearance of the first "little'un" (the one with the birthmark on his face), who savagely slay a sow and then rejoice in her blood, who kill Piggy, and who try to kill Ralph.
It is curious that the monsters in one book are full-grown adults and that they are children in the other. It seems as though monstrosity is not something that develops within us but something which is present all along, something inherent to our very natures. Children, as well as adults, possess it. Our human capacity for cruelty is great, it turns out.
In addition, both groups that become monstrous develop when there is power at stake. We want someone to be less powerful than we are, it seems, because we would rather be powerful than powerless, and we perceive power as a zero-sum game: if you have the power, then that is power I do not have. It seems that this desire for power can bring out the monster in the man.

When asked to compare and contrast, I like to examine each work on its own, then see how they line up or differ from one another.
In Lord of the Flies, monsters play a role in multiple ways. First, the boys fear the beast. They cower from the monsters on the island until they grow bold enough to "kill the beast." By the end, we see that the real monsters are the boys themselves.
Night is a memoir of Elie Wiesel's experience during the Holocaust. The monsters are the Nazis that imprison and murder the Jewish people. To a certain extent, those that turn a blind eye and let these atrocities occur can also be considered monsters.
It seems that in both works, the monsters are people. We see how humanity can turn on itself, becoming monstrous.
While Wiesel does have some inner "demons," such as how he internally wrestles with his religion, I don't believe he has a monster inside of him. In contrast, Golding seems to argue that we all have monsters inside us waiting to come out under the right circumstance, such as being isolated on a wild island.