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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 7
By Jennifer Flynn
How Wiesel realized the testimonial form needed a new ideology is unknown, but he clearly recognized it before writing Night. To achieve these aims, the author created a new perspective from which to relate his tale, an identity theory unlike any that preceded it. Autobiographies of the past enumerated multiple events that influenced the creation of one distinct self. However, Wiesel realized the Holocaust was not merely one in the lifetime of occurrences. For survivors, it was the event. He also understood that survivors were not the same after as they were before. They lived through traumas that damaged and often destroyed the core of their pre-Holocaust identities. Wiesel realized that the traditional autobiographical ideology would never account for this impact on a survivor's identity. Therefore, he broke from that form, and portrayed his self as a collection of identities that were created, affected and destroyed by this one central experience. He wrote of the daily trauma that fractured his self-conception, and led to the formation of new identities. The result was a work that embodied autobiographical scholar Judith M. Melton's theory that disruptive changes, experienced during identity formation, rupture a subject's sense of self. In her book, The Face of Exile , Melton writes, "Social discontinuity, particularly uprooting experience and general upheaval, frequently breaks the thread of memory and consciousness and fragments the sense of self" (73). This is the very situation outlined in Night ¾ a fracturing of identity caused by forced relocation and prolonged, unimaginable cruelty.
To explore the damage to his inner workings, Wiesel employed an adaptable narrator, a literary representation of his selves, with privileged information and creative leeway. The storyteller existed in the moment as he revealed it, but simultaneously viewed scenes with hindsight. In this way, he understood his self throughout each experience, and recognized moments when his identity was affected in order to report on these changes. Because Wiesel presented the story through this privileged narrator and not as a straightforward account, he illustrated his transforming self in a way testimonials could not. The narrator understood the long-term effects of events at the very moment they occurred. He was therefore able to endow each moment with its ultimate significance to heighten the reader's involvement with the text. Through this narration, Wiesel's audience witnessed and experienced changes to his identity at the same moment that he (as narrator) experienced them. In this way, the reader participated in Wiesel's journey as with the reader would of main character of a novel.
Wiesel's narrator reveals three categories of identity fracturing: the disruption of his childhood self, a battle between the inhuman self of imprisonment and the residual childhood identity, and the detachment of his physical from mental life. The splintering of his childhood self is seen on the first night he and his father are imprisoned. When a guard beats his father, Wiesel is amazed by his own lack of response: "I did not move. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, before my very eyes, and I had not flickered an eyelid. I had looked on and said nothing. Yesterday, I should have sunk my nails into the criminal's flesh. Had I changed so much, then? So quickly?" ( Night 37). Wiesel no longer conceives of himself as he did only one day before, and for good reason. He is no longer that child; everything he knew, including his own self, has changed overnight. Because it is a narrator who describes this event, Wiesel can impart reflection on his change at the very the moment it occurs.