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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume 4
Fall 2005
Page 9
By Jennifer Flynn
Flynn also gives us an insightful look at the ever-changing genre of autobiography, focusing her discussion on the inception of the autobiographic Holocaust novel with publication of Night . Here, Flynn looks at the genre itself in an effort to explain how Wiesel's work revolutionized it. She uses a community of Holocaust scholars to both illustrate the identity crisis that survivors faced and the expertise with which Wiesel transcended these limitations. Also, she makes the keen observation that a major component of Wiesel's innovation is the employment of narrative devices. His Yiddish work, she states, while conforming to the pre-established conventions of autobiography, was not flexible enough to address his identity crisis and adequately portray his self. She draws directly from Wiesel's text to substantiate these claims with examples that show Wiesel's use of literary devices that were heretofore unique to narrative, citing the use of an adaptive narrator, a nonlinear plot and metaphor and symbolism.
What do we learn from "Reshaping the Autobiographical Self"? Flynn gives her reader certain understanding of how widespread the effects of mass atrocity can be, in literature and the lives of the writers who seek to portray them. We learn just how much identity figures in the mind of an autobiographist and how Wiesel's Yiddish work serves as an example of a transitional piece that allowed Wiesel to find his newly-defined self in Night. In a new age where we are capable of more destructive powers than ever before, Flynn's theories have a special relevance.