Dawn

Darkness and nighttime are multivalent symbols in Dawn. Both strongly link to purity, violence, and death as well as Jewishness and the Movement. Specifically, midnight is the time that the dead leave their graves to pray and/or eat. When Gad argues for the Jewish peoples’ ancestral claim to Palestine, he uses night as a rhetorical symbol:

Hour after hour, Gad spoke to me of the blue nights of Palestine, of their calm and serene beauty. You walk out in the evening with a woman, you tell her that she is beautiful and you love her, and twenty centuries hear what you are saying. But for the English the night holds no beauty. For them, every night opens and shuts like a tomb. Every night, two, three, a dozen soldiers are swallowed up by the darkness and never seen again. (17)

In Gad’s view, Palestinian nights are comforting and natural to the Jews, but they violently reject outsiders like the British. In addition, night is tactically important to the Movement fighters, affording them the element of surprise: “There had been casualties on both sides, but the odds were in our favor because the night was our ally” (24). Quotations like these help emphasize night’s symbolic connection to Jews as well as the simultaneous violence and safety it affords.

As a child, Elisha confesses his fear of the dark to the Beggar, who the novel portrays as a wise spiritual guide. The Beggar tells him not to fear darkness.

“‘You mustn’t be afraid of the dark,’ he said, gently grasping my arm and making me shudder. ‘Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he does not know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.’” (4)

This presents night and darkness as a conduit for honesty and spiritual openness. In addition, it foreshadows Elisha’s relationship with Dawson. At night, Elisha dwells on his reluctance to kill. He confesses to himself that he’s unable to hate Dawson and even feels a personal connection to him; by day, he steels himself and kills Dawson. According to the Beggar’s wisdom, Elisha succumbs to the “tragedy of man” by exchanging the truth he confronted at night for a murder by daylight. At the novel’s end, this results in Elisha conforming to the night’s worst attributes: He sees his own face grafted onto “the tattered fragment of darkness” (102) he sees in the window.

In this book, dawn is a narratively important time, because it’s when David ben Moshe and Captain John Dawson are slated to die. As Dawson’s reluctant executioner, Elisha spends the night before Dawson’s killing agonizing over dawn’s approach. This is important to his character, but it also helps track the passage of time from chapter to chapter.

While night and darkness are symbolically synonymous with the Jews, light and daytime are linked to the British. This connection is strongest in Elisha’s recollection of ambushing a British military convoy; he describes its passengers as soldiers with the “sun [shining] upon their faces” (29) before Elisha and his comrades exploded their vehicle and “cut” their legs to bits with a hail of bullets.

As the time that David and John are both condemned to die, dawn firmly links them. Likewise, it’s the moment that Elisha must kill Dawson, which will “bind” them together forever. Dawn is the brief moment between day and night—and the brief moment when Jewish fighters and British soldiers coalesce. Dawn’s symbolic position as the border between life and death further emphasizes that connection. In the context of the Night trilogy, nighttime is linked to death, and daytime to life. Therefore, dawn is the thin border between the two; likewise, the book Dawn culminates in a meeting between a condemned man and his executioner.

Throughout Dawn, memories dominate Elisha’s internal monologue. Each chapter features at least one extended literary flashback, some of which appear to be psychological flashbacks. He reflects on moments from his childhood, his first encounters with Gad and the Movement, violent experiences at Buchenwald, and his time in France after the war. Elisha is often lost in these memories, completely losing track of reality in the process, as evident when his memories give way to his current situation, jarringly shifting from internal to external experience.

Sometimes, Elisha’s memories intermingle with his sensory experiences of the present. When he remembers Catherine, he doesn’t simply think about her; she appears to him: “Ilana disappeared, and Catherine was there instead” (47). This phenomenon is most overt in the ghosts who appear to Elisha and interact with him extensively throughout the fifth and sixth chapters. The ghosts themselves—whether they’re real, extended metaphors, or hallucinations—symbolize Elisha’s memories of his past and his deceased loved ones.

Dawn and the other Night trilogy entries all fundamentally focus on Jewish perspectives and issues. Eli Wiesel was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, and Dawn’s cast—except for English gentile John Dawson—is entirely Jewish. Although Elisha professes to have lost his faith in God, he’s still deeply influenced by Hasidism, the sect of Judaism in which he was raised. Throughout Dawn, he recalls Hasidic legends, Biblical characters, and Jewish folklore, and he meditates on elements of Jewish faith such as prayer and Cabala (Jewish mysticism). These details color his perceptions throughout the book. For example, when Elisha meets Gad, he regards him as a messenger from God. Everything he observes about Gad conforms to this perception: “In Hasidic legends the messenger is always portrayed standing” (16). This, coupled with his perception of Zion as a spiritual ideal, compels Elisha to regard the Movement’s Zionism as a holy calling.

Elisha spends much of his inner monologue attempting to parse God’s whims and intentions, much as he and the other fighters attempt to understand the Old Man. Although his confidence wavers, Elisha tends to believe that God favors the Movement over the Nazis and the British. “God doesn’t wear a uniform […] God is a member of the Resistance unit, a terrorist” (30). When wrestling with his imposed role in Dawson’s execution, he doesn’t question whether he’ll go through with it. Instead, he attempts to justify the action beforehand by invoking God:

“Don’t judge me, judge God. He created the universe and made justice stem from injustices. He brought it about that a people should attain happiness through tears, that the freedom of a nation, like that of a man, should be a monument built upon a pile, a foundation of dead bodies […] You must judge God. He is the prime mover; He conceived men and things the way they are. You are dead, father, and only the dead may judge God.” (72)

In this way, Elisha’s appeal to God’s supreme authority ultimately reflects his fatalistic nihilism. He diverts culpability for his own actions to God and argues that he’s compelled by forces beyond his control. The notion that “only the dead may judge God” is fatalistic. Elisha feels that he’s in no position to determine his own actions or appraise his situation; he feels that all he can do is act. The ghosts respond to Elisha’s appeal with silence. This silence evokes Sheol, the baren afterlife depicted in the Tanakh. The term Sheol is thought to derive from a word that means “hollow”. In Jewish religious texts, Sheol is nondescript and subject to interpretation; it’s where the dead go regardless of their behavior in life. In Dawn, Wiesel implies that Sheol is a state of being rather than a set location.