The Accident by Elie Wiesel

First published:Le Jour, 1961 (English translation, 1962)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Principal characters:

• Eliezer, the narrator, a journalist
• Kathleen, Eliezer’s sweetheart
• Eliezer’s grandmother, a victim of the Holocaust but still present in Eliezer’s memory
• Dr. Paul Russel, the young resident who cares for Eliezer in the hospital
• Sarah, a prostitute who as a twelve-year-old girl was sexually abused by the Nazis
• Gyula, a painter of Hungarian origin

Overview

The Accident, a novella of little more than one hundred pages, is a psychological, philosophical, and spiritual journey. The narrator of the story, Eliezer, is a young journalist who has been spiritually immobilized by the Holocaust, in which he lost his family and of which he is a survivor. The narrative opens as Eliezer and Kathleen, his sweetheart, who loves him profoundly but to whom he is unable to make a commitment, are going to see the film version of The Brothers Karamazov in New York City. Hot, tired, bored, and lifeless, Eliezer lags behind Kathleen in crossing a street and is struck and dragged several yards by a taxicab. Suffering severe injuries, he is taken to a hospital, where, after three days, he undergoes surgery. The young doctor who attends him, Paul Russel, takes a special interest in him, showing a curiosity that makes Eliezer suspect that the doctor knows something about him. The reader discovers that Eliezer was subconsciously a willing victim of his nearly fatal accident.

Dr. Russel’s mention of Kathleen causes Eliezer to recall meeting her for the first time in Paris, some five or six years earlier. At that time, as now, he had come to the end of his hope and strength because of the oppressive memories of his experiences during the Holocaust. For years he has suffered from what is called “survivor guilt,” just as, when a young boy, he felt guilty for being happier than a less fortunate orphan boy. Throughout the narrative, as it moves back and forth between present and past, Eliezer returns to thoughts of his grandmother and the rest of his family, all of whom were executed by the Nazis. He thinks of himself as being dead with them and the other six million people destroyed by the Holocaust. Kathleen attempts to alleviate his guilt and suffering by suffering herself; still, she is never able to penetrate the wall that Eliezer has put up around himself.

During his recovery from the accident, Eliezer wonders whether Kathleen knows the cause underlying it and that he allowed himself to be hurt because he did not care enough to get out of the way. Dr. Russel, who has just felt the joy of saving a young boy’s life, asks Eliezer one day why his patient does not care about living. Eliezer evades the doctor’s angry questioning, but the reader is apprised of the answer: Those who have survived the Holocaust are no longer normal human beings; a spring has snapped inside them from the shock, and the results must appear sooner or later. Eliezer does not want the doctor to understand and thus lose his equilibrium. By abstractions and grandiloquence and evasions akin to lying, Eliezer persuades the doctor to believe that he does love life, proving it by his love for Kathleen.

Eliezer’s relationship with Kathleen provides one of the main transitional devices in the narrative. For example, Kathleen asks him who Sarah is, since Eliezer, she says, had spoken her name during a coma. Sarah, he tells her, was his mother’s name. It was also, however, as a flashback reveals, the name of a prostitute whom Eliezer had met in Paris long before he came to know Kathleen. That Sarah was twelve years old when she was sent to a special barracks for the pleasure of the Nazi officers at a concentration camp. Eliezer considers Sarah to be a saint, like his mother. Kathleen’s slight resemblance to his mother turns Eliezer’s thoughts back to the time of Kathleen’s emotional struggle when they became lovers again after a separation of five years. The past—and all that it meant to Eliezer—stood between them; thus, Kathleen extracted a promise from him that he would allow her to help him in his fight against memories of the train station from which his mother and father and little sister were taken to their deaths.

The last chapter of the book introduces Gyula, a painter, originally from Hungary, who ignores Eliezer’s attempts to explain his suffering and the reason behind the accident. Gyula pleads for him to forget the tragic past and make a commitment to life. He then paints a portrait of his friend in which the eyes are those of a man who had seen God commit the unforgivable crime of senseless killing. Enraged because Eliezer is intent on perpetuating the past rather than returning to the present, Gyula sets fire to the canvas and leaves, forgetting—as Eliezer says in ending his narrative—to take along the ashes.

Consonant with the story in which they appear, the characters in Elie Wiesel’s novella are shadowy and disembodied, either alive in the midst of death or dead in the midst of life, depending on their purpose in the narrative. The characters can be no other way, as the narrator sees life only with the eyes of death. His grandmother has long been dead, but she is more of a presence in the work than the physically living Kathleen or any of the other characters.

Gyula and Dr. Russel are an evanescent opposition to the nihilism of Eliezer. They pass quickly through the novella without being fully developed. Wiesel wanted nothing more from them, artistically, than their appearance as voices in support of life and love. Kathleen is like them, ineffectual in spite of her love and energy. No character can counter the gloominess of Eliezer, while characters such as Sarah and his grandmother act as constant reminders of death.

Though Wiesel’s characters are grounded in his own Holocaust experience, the story springs more from his imagination than from his life. There are many influences working on his imagination: culture, history, stories, myths, and the Bible. For example, from Jewish culture Wiesel draws the Hebrew name of God (El) in the naming of Eliezer; other characters—Sarah, Shmuel, and Sarah the prostitute—also have biblical origins.

Self-annihilation by surrendering to death is a central theme of The Accident. Some years after surviving the death camps, in which he lost his family, Eliezer can no longer continue struggling to live. Even his love for Kathleen is insufficient to give meaning to his existence. It is easy, therefore, for the reader to accept that Eliezer passively intended to take his life when he stepped in front of the taxicab that seriously injured him. Suicide among survivors of the Holocaust is a phenomenon that Wiesel explicitly addresses in a preface written for the 1985 edition of The Accident. Referring to the hundreds of Jewish children in Poland who quietly surrendered to death after World War II, he suggests that they “were abruptly forced to realize to what extent they were depleted. And vanquished. And stigmatized. And alone.” Eliezer’s state of mind, affected by the same tragedy, is similar to that of those children.

The primary message of The Accident is that one who has experienced the Holocaust and survived it is almost certainly doomed to live it obsessively over and over again, to feel self-hatred as a consequence of survivor guilt, to resent those who are not outraged by the individuals responsible for the Holocaust, and to cry out against God for apparently acquiescing to the horror.

Life and love, the other central themes of the novella, are set in contrast to the themes of death and hatred and suffering. Eliezer is urged again and again to return to life, just as he is urged to put the past behind him and to accept love and give it. The effort to achieve forgetfulness is too much for him, however, and the last line of The Accident (“He [Gyula] had forgotten to take along the ashes”) reveals the finality with which Eliezer has chosen death over life. Neither love nor life can erase the ever-present memory of the Holocaust. The tragedies of the past make impossible any hopes for the present or the future for him.

The Accident was Elie Wiesel’s third book and should be read in sequence following its predecessors. His first book, a memoir recounting his experience of the Holocaust, had a complex publishing history. Originally written in Yiddish, and running to some nine hundred pages in manuscript, it first appeared in its present form in French translation, radically condensed, as La Nuit (1958; Night, 1960). Wiesel himself has said that “Night is not a novel, it’s an autobiography. It’s a memoir. It’s testimony.” Nevertheless, it has frequently been classified as fiction. Night was followed by the novellas L’Aube (1960; Dawn, 1961) and The Accident. Unfortunately, the English title chosen for the latter obscures the thematic progression of the three books: Le Jour, the original French title of The Accident, means “day.” Metaphorically, the French title suggests the survivor’s full confrontation with the ongoing reality of life after the “night” of the Holocaust; the sequence of “night,” “dawn,” and “day” traces an ongoing struggle, not a neatly resolved movement from despair to hope.

As the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, Wiesel has enhanced an already considerable worldwide literary reputation. He has long been recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of the Jewish experience and, inseparable from that experience, the Holocaust. Eliezer, the protagonist of The Accident, the victim, the survivor, may be seen as a living counterpart of any one of the six million who did not survive the death camps. With other writers who cover the Holocaust—such as André Schwarz-Bart, Primo Levi, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Ernst Weichert, Vladka Meed, Pierre Gascar, and Tadeusz Borowski—Wiesel has helped create a literature intended to ensure that victims, living or dead, of any kind of inhumanity will never be forgotten.

Sources for Further Study

Brown, Robert McAfee. Elie Wiesel: Messenger to All Humanity. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.

Fine, Ellen S. Legacy of “Night”: The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982.

Freedman, Samuel G. “Bearing Witness.” The New York Times, October 23, 1983, p. A32.

Kolbert, Jack. The Worlds of Elie Wiesel: An Overview of His Career and His Major Themes. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2001.

Rosen, Alan, ed. Celebrating Elie Wiesel: Stories, Essays, Reflections. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998.

Rosenfeld, Alvin H., and Irving Greenberg, eds. Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

Wiesel, Elie, and Richard D. Heffner. Conversations with Elie Wiesel. Edited by Thomas J. Vinciguerra. New York: Schocken Books, 2001.