Dawn

by

Elie Wiesel

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Themes and Colors
Revenge, Terrorism, and War Theme Icon
Past, Present, and Future Theme Icon
God and Religion Theme Icon
Hatred, Killing, and Humanity Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dawn, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Past, Present, and Future Theme Icon

In Dawn, Wiesel portrays the dead as the witnesses and judges of the present. He does this by having Elisha’s dead acquaintances appear as ghosts at key moments in the story. (Although only Elisha can see these figures, the ghosts’ visibility, and the hot, stuffy sensation they bring with them, suggest that they’re really ghosts, not just Elisha’s memories.) The presence of the dead in the story indicates the heavy shadow of the past that guides Elisha’s choice to go to Palestine after surviving the Holocaust; he assumes he is acting on behalf of the dead and for the sake of a better future for his fellow Jews. The ghosts are oppressively prominent the night before Elisha is slated to execute a British soldier, adding to Elisha’s fear and doubt about his orders to kill Dawson. Though Elisha insistently asks, he can’t get a direct judgment from any of these witnesses—not from the ghost of his father, his old rabbi, or even his younger self—about what he’s about to do. Yet at the end of the book, the ghosts wordlessly depart with Dawson’s spirit, suggesting that they aren’t on Elisha’s side after all. Elisha’s interactions with the ghosts suggest that, not only does he make his predecessors somehow complicit in his violent actions, but he cannot assume that the dead would approve of his committing violence on their behalf.

Through Elisha, the book emphasizes that one cannot act for the future’s sake without carrying the burden of the past at the same time. The night before the execution, Elisha is surrounded by the ghosts of his parents, his old rabbi, and English soldiers he’s ambushed: “As I let my eyes wander about the room I realized that all of those who had contributed to my formation, to the formation of my permanent identity, were there.” At first, none of the ghosts will respond to Elisha’s questions, until the ghost of Elisha himself as a small child tells him, “We want to see you carry [the execution] out. We want to see you turn into a murderer.” Elisha realizes that in some sense, everyone who’s part of him will witness the execution.

Not only that, the ghosts will become complicit in the execution: “‘You are the sum total of all that we have been,’ said the youngster who looked like my former self. ‘In a way we are the ones to execute John Dawson. Because you can't do it without us. Now, do you see?’” Elisha comes to understand that “An act so absolute as that of killing involves not only the killer but, as well, those who have formed him. In murdering a man I was making them murderers.” Elisha is not only answerable to those who’ve contributed to making him who he is; he inevitably implicates them—and, by implication, all Jewish people—in his actions.

The execution makes Elisha wonder if his action for the future’s sake really achieves any good on the Jewish people’s behalf. As Elisha prepares to carry out his orders, he tries to convince himself that John Dawson is interchangeable with those who’ve made him and his loved ones suffer in the past: “As I went down the stairs I was sure that I would meet the man who had condemned David ben Moshe to death, the man who had killed my parents, the man who had come between me and the man I had wanted to become, and who was now ready to kill the man in me.” Yet, instead, Elisha finds that Dawson is a likeable man with his own connections to the past back in England, who doesn’t even know why he’s being executed. This causes Elisha’s logic—that, through this execution, he’s striking a blow on his people’s behalf—to begin to unravel.

After the ghosts watch Elisha shoot Dawson, they offer no comment, but they accompany Dawson’s spirit out of the cell: “the little boy walked at his side as if to guide him. I seemed to hear my mother say: ‘Poor boy! Poor boy!’” It’s ambiguous whether his mother’s words here refer to Elisha or to Dawson. In either case, the ghosts’ actions suggest that, contrary to Elisha’s self-justifications, they side with the unjust sufferer, Dawson, and not with Elisha. This destroys Elisha’s previous understanding of his actions. Though he carries the burden of his past wherever he goes, he realizes he cannot assume that there is an unbroken line of logic between his past, his present actions, and his people’s future. In turn, this forces him to question whether the ghosts of his past—the people whose sufferings motivate him—approve of his methods to secure a future for the Jewish people.

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Past, Present, and Future ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Past, Present, and Future appears in each chapter of Dawn. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Past, Present, and Future Quotes in Dawn

Below you will find the important quotes in Dawn related to the theme of Past, Present, and Future.
Chapter 1 Quotes

"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.

Related Characters: The Beggar (speaker), Elisha
Related Symbols: Faces and Eyes
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

In the concentration camp I had cried out in sorrow and anger against God and also against man, who seemed to have inherited only the cruelty of his creator. I was anxious to re-evaluate my revolt in an atmosphere of detachment, to view it in terms of the present.

So many questions obsessed me. Where is God to be found? In suffering or in rebellion? When is a man most truly a man? When he submits or when he refuses? […] Philosophy, I hoped, would give me an answer. It would free me from my memories, my doubts, my feeling of guilt.

Related Characters: Elisha (speaker)
Page Number: 12
Explanation and Analysis:

"You want my future?" I asked. "What will you do with it?"

He smiled again, but in a cold, distant manner as one who possesses a power over men. "I'll make it into an outcry," he said, and there was a strange light in his dark eyes. "An outcry first of despair and then of hope. And finally a shout of triumph."

Related Characters: Elisha (speaker), Gad (speaker)
Page Number: 14
Explanation and Analysis:

Gad's stories were utterly fascinating. I saw in him a prince of Jewish history, a legendary messenger sent by fate to awaken my imagination, to tell the people whose past was now their religion: Come, come; the future is waiting for you with open arms. From now on you will no longer be humiliated, persecuted, or even pitied. You will not be strangers encamped in an age and a place that are not yours. Come, brothers, come!

Related Characters: Elisha (speaker), Gad
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

We don't like to be bearers of death; heretofore we've chosen to be victims rather than executioners. The commandment Thou shalt not kill was given from the summit of one of the mountains here in Palestine, and we were the only ones to obey it. But that's all over; we must be like everybody else. Murder will be not our profession but our duty. In the days and weeks and months to come you will have only one purpose: to kill those who have made us killers. We shall kill in order that once more we may be men[.]

Related Characters: Gad (speaker), Elisha
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:

I remembered how the grizzled master had explained the sixth commandment to me. Why has a man no right to commit murder? Because in so doing he takes upon himself the function of God. And this must not be done too easily. Well, I said to myself, if in order to change the course of our history we have to become God, we shall become Him. How easy that is we shall see. No, it was not easy.

When Elisha trains to become a terrorist, he doesn’t just discover new ideas about what it means to live in Zion (the Holy Land). He also discovers new interpretations of the religious teachings on which he was raised. Here he explains how his childhood mentor, a rabbi known as the grizzled master, taught him to understand the sixth of the Ten Commandments, the one which prohibits killing. The grizzled master explains that life and death are in God’s hands, so killing someone means wrongly playing the role of God. As Elisha becomes indoctrinated into the Movement’s ideas, however, he looks at the sixth commandment in a new way—accepting that in order to secure a peaceful future, the Jewish people have a responsibility to “become God,” even if that includes killing. If they don’t do this, he reasons, they will continue to be at the mercy of history and may eventually cease to exist as a people. Dawn as a whole is the story of Elisha learning just how difficult it is to live out such an idea.

Related Characters: Elisha (speaker), The Grizzled Master
Page Number: 23
Chapter 4 Quotes

"Poor boy!" she repeated. […] Ilana disappeared, and Catherine was there instead. I wondered why Catherine had come, but her apparition did not particularly surprise me. […] She liked to speak of love to little boys, and since men going to their death are little boys she liked to speak to them of love. For this reason her presence in the magical room—magical because it transcended the differences […] between the present and the past—was not surprising.

Related Characters: Ilana (speaker), Elisha, Catherine
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

Suddenly I became aware that the room was stuffy, so stuffy that I was almost stifled. No wonder. The room was small, far too small to receive so many visitors at one time. Ever since midnight the visitors had been pouring in. Among them were people I had known, people I had hated, admired, forgotten. As I let my eyes wander about the room I realized that all of those who had contributed to my formation, to the formation of my permanent identity, were there. Some of them were familiar, but I could not pin a label upon them; they were names without faces or faces without names. And yet I knew that at some point my life had crossed theirs.

Related Characters: Elisha (speaker)
Page Number: 44
Explanation and Analysis:

"But it's all quite simple," he exclaimed. "We are here to be present at the execution. We want to see you carry it out. We want to see you turn into a murderer. That's natural enough, isn't it?" […]

I was beginning to understand. An act so absolute as that of killing involves not only the killer but, as well, those who have formed him. In murdering a man I was making them murderers.

Related Characters: Elisha (speaker), The Little Boy (speaker)
Page Number: 46
Explanation and Analysis:

There are not a thousand ways of being a killer; either a man is one or he isn't. He can't say I'll kill only ten or only twenty-six men; I'll kill for only five minutes or a single day. He who has killed one man alone is a killer for life. He may choose another occupation, hide himself under another identity but the executioner or at least the executioner's mask will be always with him. There lies the problem: in the influence of the backdrop of the play upon the actor. War had made me an executioner, and an executioner I would remain even after the backdrop had changed, when I was acting in another play upon a different stage.

Related Characters: Elisha (speaker)
Page Number: 55
Explanation and Analysis:

Yerachmiel and I decided to try. Of course we were aware of the danger: No one can force God's hand with impunity. Men older wiser, and more mature than ourselves had tried in vain to wrest the Messiah from the chains of the future; failing in their purpose they had lost their faith, their reason, and even their lives. […] We purified our souls and bodies, fasting by day and praying by night. […]

"We too," I said, "my comrades in the Movement and I, are trying to force God's hand. You who are dead should help us, not hinder…”

But Yerachmiel [was] silent. And somewhere in the universe of time the Messiah was silent as well.

Related Characters: Elisha (speaker), Yerachmiel
Page Number: 59
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Without hate, everything that my comrades and I were doing would be done in vain. Without hate we could not hope to obtain victory. Why do I try to hate you, John Dawson? Because my people have never known how to hate. Their tragedy, throughout the centuries, has stemmed from their inability to hate those who have humiliated and from time to time exterminated them. Now our only chance lies in hating you, in learning the necessity and the art of hate. Otherwise, John Dawson, our future will only be an extension of the past, and the Messiah will wait indefinitely for his deliverance.

Related Characters: Elisha (speaker), John Dawson
Page Number: 77
Explanation and Analysis:

I fired. When he pronounced my name he was already dead; the bullet had gone through his heart. A dead man, whose lips were still warm, had pronounced my name: Elisha.

[…] That's it, I said to myself. It's done. I've killed. I've killed Elisha. The ghosts began to leave the cell, taking John Dawson with them. The little boy walked at his side as if to guide him. I seemed to hear my mother say: "Poor boy! Poor boy!"

Related Characters: Elisha (speaker), John Dawson, The Little Boy, Elisha’s Mother
Page Number: 80
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Elisha (speaker)
Related Symbols: Faces and Eyes, Dawn
Page Number: 81
Explanation and Analysis: