In Dawn, faces and eyes symbolize death, both physical and spiritual. The frequent presence of faces and eyes in the novel suggests that the dead are always watching the living and witnessing their actions. In other words, death is always hovering over life, and the past always weighs on the present, no matter how the living try to ignore or escape this reality. For instance, before Elisha executes John Dawson, he is haunted by the faces of loved ones and acquaintances who’ve died. These ghosts silently witness Elisha as he becomes a killer and remind him that whatever he does, he carries them with him and involves them in his actions.
When Elisha was a young boy, a beggar had taught him to distinguish day from night by looking for a face in the window at nightfall. Whenever Elisha gazes into a window, he usually sees the face of someone dead, but Elisha sees his own face in the window after Dawson’s execution, suggesting that, in committing murder, Elisha has undergone a moral death. The grizzled master also taught Elisha that Death is a creature who is “all eyes”—meaning that it’s made up purely of eyes and no other body parts. When Elisha prepares to execute Dawson, he wonders if he will appear to be “all eyes,” and he wonders if David ben Moshe’s hangman looks the same way.
Faces and Eyes Quotes in Dawn
I did not know the man. To my eyes he had no face; he did not even exist, for I knew nothing about him. I did not know whether he scratched his nose when he ate, whether he talked or kept quiet when he was making love, whether he gloried in his hate, whether he betrayed his wife or his God or his own future. All I knew was that he was an Englishman and my enemy. The two terms were synonymous.
"Listen," he said, digging his fingers into my arm. "I'm going to teach you the art of distinguishing between day and night. Always look at a window, and failing that look into the eyes of a man. If you see a face, any face, then you can be sure that night has succeeded day. For, believe me, night has a face." […]
Every evening since then I had made a point of standing near a window to witness the arrival of night. And every evening I saw a face outside. It was not always the same face […] I knew nothing about them except that they were dead.
The night lifted, leaving behind it a grayish light the color of stagnant water. Soon there was only a tattered fragment of darkness, hanging in midair, the other side of the window. Fear caught my throat. The tattered fragment of darkness had a face. Looking at it, I understood the reason for my fear. The face was my own.
Faces and Eyes Symbol Timeline in Dawn
