This one character ceases to amaze me: Ilana. Ilana seems to always be there for Elie through thick and through thin, acting as his mother figure that the reader has now assumed is dead. It just came to my attention that the room so full of people by which Elie encountered could have been people that were killed, and he had met. But no, because Gad, Joab, and Ilana were present as well. So maybe death isn't really a tangible, physical decline? Maybe death is when one comes close to that tangible renaissance but decides not to cross over to the "light." "My mother and father, the master and the beggar were all there" (Wiesel 56). I am assuming since Elie's mother and father died in the Holocaust, that the beggar and the master are dead as well. Or maybe, the beggar man was dead to begin with, that is why Elie questions why he never eats and he never sleeps.
The quote that I thought was insurmountable and could not have been worded better was: "The sum of these silences filled me with fear. Their silences were different from mine; they were hard, cold, immobile, lifeless, incapable of change" (Wiesel 56). This quote represents peace, death, life, and birth all in two sentences. This to me is amazing how Elie Wiesel was able to encapsulate all these four stages of life into that phrase. Because death is silent, and silence scares some people. That phrase could sum up the book: with fear as displayed in Elie when he is ordered to kill a British man, and yet the immobility and hardness and coldness and depth of life. This was amazing how he could compress his eighty-page novel into two sentences: much like how a Neutron Sstar is so dense, a mere cubic centimeter of Neutron Star has the same mass as Mt. Everest.
I can't wait to see what twists and turns this book takes, because so far it really has taken none. Nothing climatic has happened; the beggar did not die a dramatic death, and there was nothing significant where we feel truly sorry and empathetic for Elie.
I found it strange that Elisha finally mustered up the strength within himself to go bring the food to John Dawson, but immediately afterwards Gad came and took it as if to hide something. I think that maybe they had not really told Dawson about the execution as they said they had. I think that they were afraid that Elisha would find out if he had taken the food down. I also thought it was strange that Ilana was caressing and stroking Elisha. She had Gad as a boyfriend and he was gone so it seemed a little suspicious. I realized that it wasn’t secret love because she was just trying to calm his mind down as a friend.
ReplyDeleteI liked how Elisha stood before his dead parents, his dead old master, and his dead friends to ask them what he should do. It reminded me of Avatar the Last Airbender where someone had to kill another man and he called forth past reincarnations to ask them if he should do it. They all told him to kill the bad guy but he eventually found a way to get rid of him without actually killing him. I wondered if something like this could happen in Dawn. Elisha asked the dead what he should do but they all remained silent. One said that the dead are not the judges of him but the silence was a judge.