Syncronicity (Writing Dump from Sophomore Year)
Here's a writing dump from last year, which is one of the essays I wrote in the final week of the year since I didn't do any work that whole year. It's an analysis of Elie Wiesel's Night.
An unreliable diagnosis, a lottery ticket, a freak vehicular collision. Throughout our lives, we make decisions that dramatically change our future, but we also have decisions made for us, by others or by chance (though in a solipsistic sense they are the same). This chance can be equally dramatic, but uncertainty is also a crucial part of our decision-making process. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses chance to enrich the portrayal of decision-making and its implications, helping to distance himself from being an active character as part of his destroyed identity, turning his innocence into the innocence of the meteor that happens to kill the dinosaurs. Things that happen by utter chance help convey Wiesel’s utter powerlessness as well as magnify the meaningless cruelty of the Holocaust.
In a game with equal payouts in the worst- and best-case scenario of each strategy, each player’s best strategy is to pick their strategy completely randomly. Wiesel faces an apt opponent in this exact scenario when he must decide whether to stay in his current concentration camp by excuse of his swollen foot or run, having heard rumors that liberation was coming to the camp. He hears that the Nazis will kill everyone remaining in the face of imminent liberation from some, from others he hears he will be liberated. Absent of any real indication of truth, he is stuck with a meaningless decision: stay and probably be killed, or leave and probably be killed. Arbitrarily, he decides to leave, but as it turns out, the camp was liberated.
“‘Well, Father, what do we do?’
“He was silent.
“‘Let’s be evacuated with the others,’ I said.
“He didn’t answer. He was looking at my foot.
“‘You think you’ll be able to walk?’
“‘Yes, I think so.’
“‘Let’s hope we won’t regret it, Eliezer.’
“After the war, I learned the fate of those who had remained at the infirmary. They were, quite simply, liberated by the Russians, two days after the evacuation” (82).
This randomness adds depth to the story that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. The reader grows angry at Elie’s sad fate (for horrible happenings follow), but knows that his decision was completely impossible. This emphasizes the ridiculous cruelty of his truly trapped situation.
However, this has further implications. The trapped situation - this disempowerment of Wiesel - can also say something about his character. Night is composed as detached, sparse prose almost with more white space than words. In its original form it was an angry historical account. Apart of the situation, he also attempts to distance himself from agency. He is a character to whom things happen, but he does nothing. This is achieved without denying what he did do by reminding the reader of the consistent randomness which truly removed his control of his own life. “I know that he must not drink. But he pleaded with me so long that I gave in. Water was the worst poison for him, but what else could I do for him? With or without water, it would be over soon anyway” (110). Another decisionless decision, Elie has to participate in his father’s death, but he makes it clear he is forced into it. His inevitable involvement makes it all the more painful.
This chain of symbolism has yet another level. Wiesel’s non-participatory participation comes from a lack of individual identity. Dehumanised by the SS officers and his situation, without a concept of self, Elie cannot take direct involvement in his life. However, the change is even better seen in Moishe the Beadle. After escaping, his sole goal is to warn the others. “Day after day, night after night, he went from one Jewish house to the next, telling his story” (7). He does this despite no one listening. What does him in is his loss of identity. “Moishe was not the same. The joy in his eyes was gone. He no longer sang. He no longer mentioned either God or Kabbalah…. Even Moishe the Beadle had fallen silent. He was weary of talking. He would drift through synagogue or through the streets, hunched over, eyes cast down, avoiding people’s gaze” (8). His power to change the future is lost with his loss of himself in the atrocities of the Holocaust. Elie possesses this same enthusiasm before being taken away. “I had asked my father to sell everything, to liquidate everything, and to leave” (9). His attempt to make a decision - a real one - is useful in contrasting his lack of resolve after leaving.
This further affects Elie’s perceived innocence. When agency is taken away, what can really be blamed on someone making decisions that are not truly decisions, or that occur randomly. The most obvious portrayal of guilt in the story is with his father, who he has stuck with and loved all this time.
“I gave him what was left of my soup. But my heart was heavy. I was aware that I was doing it grudgingly.
“Just like Rabbi Eliahu’s son, I had not passed the test” (107).
Despite making the decision to give his father soup, Elie feels guilty for being hungry - for needing the food that he knows will likely be wasted in the end. Here the randomness produces two opposite forces. The forcing of a decision creates the guilt that he feels, but an intellectual understanding of the randomness itself helps to clear him of his perceived crime.
Most importantly, Wiesel's powerlessness helps to emphasize the meaningless cruelty of the Holocaust. Two times minor confrontations are made excruciating by randomness’s Godly touch. First, Elie is offered a good Kommando in exchange for his shoes. “He liked my shoes; I would not let him have them. Later, they were taken from me anyway. In exchange for nothing, that time” (48). If he did indeed value his shoes over a promise of a good Kommando, he may have made the right decision, had he not lost his shoes other how. Seeing the absurd tradeoff made in this way angers and frustrates the reader: the brief touch with opportunity, with an alternate timeline, is alluring in such a sad tale. Any alternate timeline seems better than reality, and seeing how it could have been different makes you realize how sad it was. Later, an even bigger sacrifice is made. After Wiesel refuses to give the foreman his gold crown, the foreman starts to treat Elie’s father harshly for messing up his march. Wiesel tries to train him, but it does not work, and eventually he gives in. “Two weeks later, all the Poles were transferred to another camp. I had lost my crown for nothing” (56). He lost weeks of time and energy teaching his father as well. What would have happened had he not done so? Perhaps the crown would have led to him getting something he needed. Asking the question, though, reminds you to ask the other questions. What if they had escaped Sighet? What if Hitler had not risen to power? What if Wiesel had been sorted into the crematorium line rather than the workers line?
Imagine that, after a ball you drop happens to land in a wastebasket, you calculate the odds to be one-in-a-million. However, you must remember that you have already observed the event, so the odds are in fact one hundred percent. Wiesel writes about surviving those one-in-a-million odds, but anyone who didn’t wouldn’t have been able to write a book. Though the coincidences may be constructed, his calling of attention to these random chances helps remind us that he is a special case - so many others were not so lucky. Which is deeply depressing, given the context.