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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 8
By Jennifer Flynn
By the middle of the text, Wiesel is losing his humanity, and appears unmoved by the horrors that surround him. He writes, "The thousands who had died daily at Auschwitz and at Birkenau in the crematory ovens no longer troubled me" (59). After witnessing an execution, he coldly recollects that he "found the soup excellent that evening" (60). This is not the spiritual Wiesel of the introduction. The boy interested in the mysteries of Jewish faith is fading and yet that identity fights to remain. A short time later, Wiesel is deeply grieved by the execution of a young boy. He later reflects, "That night the soup tasted of corpses" (62). From this, the reader can see that Wiesel's initial identity persists despite the appearance of a new, calloused self. Thus, at least two identities exist simultaneously. Through the symbolic act of eating his soup, Wiesel links these two moments, increasing the weight of each encounter by illustrating his alteration through them.
The last category is the separation of Wiesel's mental and physical existences. While most people experience them concurrently, e.g. by thinking about a desired activity and then acting it out, the narrator experiences a detachment of mind and body. On one of the forced runs imposed by the Nazis, the author notes, "I was dragging with me this skeletal body which weighed so much. If only I could have got rid of it! In spite of my efforts not to think about it, I could feel myself as two entities ¾ my body and me" (81). Wiesel's mental and physical selves have divided into separate worlds, and he can exist in only one realm at a time. Tormented by the threat of becoming an inhumane replica of his former self, he now struggles to balance these two sides as well. Thus, the sagacious narrator guides the reader through Wiesel's evolution, from past to present, through compassionate and indifferent selves to his fractured psychological and physical identities. Through his novelistic narrator, Wiesel found his way to deliver all of these contrary and diverse representations of his self.
Wiesel's innovative depiction was not only a presentation of his fractured identity, but also a means of rebuilding it. While nothing would erase his memories or dull his loss, the process of arranging and communicating his experience had curative powers. The monumental impact of his words affected him more than any other. Creating a perspective from which to meaningfully consider the Holocaust was Wiesel's goal, and in accomplishing it, he helped not only the world, but also himself. In documenting his damaged identity, he trod the path to reconstructing it. As Melton writes, "The autobiographical act, cataloging this disintegrating self and creating new strategies for formulating it, becomes a healing process" (80). Telling the story of his inner life, remembering and ruminating upon who he once was and what he had become, helped Wiesel to unify and ultimately reclaim his identity.
The disparity between Wiesel's texts is clear, but the difference Naomi Seidman perceives as a suppression of emotion in the latter work is more of a by-product of the author's concentration on identity. In writing Night, Wiesel focused on his self, creating a text with the individualism that was missing from the testimonial form. Wiesel pursued this personalization, not to increase readership, but because he believed it was essential to communicate both his experience and his self, both the external situation and its internal effect. This move towards introspection was a shift in perspective, not a sacrifice of emotion. Novelistic devices and a thorough investigation of identity increased the autobiographical element of Wiesel's work, and consequently, the impact of his tale.