Unasserted Experience: The Holocaust Trauma in Elie Wiesel's The Night Trilogy

• Main Authors: Jing-shyan Chen, 陳靜
• Other Authors: Rose Hsiu-li Juan
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1999
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/01305005633249529413

碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 外國語文學系 === 87 === Abstract The Holocaust initiates a condition of terror and horror and becomes the Holocaust victim's nightmare for the rest of his life. Many Holocaust victims still cannot get rid of the shadow of the massacre even after fifty years have passed. The Holocaust torments them very much, causing them to lose confidence completely and suffer post-traumatic disease. Elie Wiesel's The Night Trilogy is such a novel, which tells the Holocaust victim's wound, terror, depression, strong sense of shame and guilt, and desire for suicide. The purpose of this thesis is to discuss not only the trauma of the Holocaust victim, but how it deeply affects him whether in the process of bearing witness or in the post-Holocaust life. The thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapters One and Five are "Introduction" and "Conclusion" respectively. The rest is the main body of my analysis. In Chapter Two, l focus on the Holocaust victim's "unspeakable" misery and his fear of a complete rendition of the Holocaust experiences when refacing the massacre. The Holocaust compels the victim to confront his inability and powerlessness to tell and to suffer great pain during the process of bearing witness. The more memory he wants to retrieve, the more trauma he experiences, and the more silence he falls into. The act of telling may itself become severely traumatizing and be lived as a return of the trauma, leading him to reexperience the event itself. Rather than making a “complete" account of traumatic event, the Holocaust victim, when telling, would fall into silence, scream in great terror, or describe nightmares and demoniacal pictures which inflict him at night. Chapter Three is concerned with the Holocaust victim's awkward predicament of post-Holocaust life, which is mixed with the shadow of the genocide. Undoubtedly, the victim who survives the Holocaust has two different worlds in his mind: one is the realm of trauma; the other is the realm of ordinary life. Although he wants to lead his new life and repress his wounded memory from his consciousness, he cannot dismiss the shadow of the traumatic past from his mind permanently, and he is often plagued by the recurrence of the repressed. He is doomed to live with both his past and his present life. In Chapter Four, the major concern is the Holocaust victim's tainted memory and his frantic searching as presented in the novel. l want to show that the victim's tainted memory about his "selfish" act in the camps causes him to feel ashamed, lose the will to survive, and confront his impossibility of mourning for the dead. Suffered from the intense pain of his tainted memory, he has to resort to various forms of "transcendental experiences," such as denying the death of his beloved people, idealizing his mother as goddess, walling off his unpleasant memory, and longing for his hometown, in order to find a place where his injured mind can be comforted. Therefore, the pain of the Holocaust victim is actually beyond our ability to imagine, and it needs to be solaced. Today what we can do is to show our concern and sympathy for those Holocaust victims or any other victims in the world rather than to keep silence when facing the sufferings of others.