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Irony
Definition of Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other... read full definition
Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Withered Trees:
During Eliezer and his father’s time at Birkenau, he compares the prisoners to “withered trees.” With this metaphor, the story illustrates how quickly the prisoners are stripped of their humanity and will to live:
Not far from us, prisoners were at work. Some were digging holes, others were carrying sand. None as much as glanced at us. We were withered trees in the heart of the desert. Behind me, people were talking. I had no desire to listen to what they were saying, or to know who was speaking and what about. Nobody dared raise his voice, even though there was no guard around. We whispered.
Eliezer already thinks of himself and the other prisoners as “damned souls wandering through the void.” He is “overcome by fatigue” and grief. At Birkenau and Auschwitz, the prisoners are faced with death and pain, beaten and forced to watch children die. Even after stripping the prisoners of faith, dignity, and hope, the Gestapo barely keep them alive and inject their lives with unending fear. This fear and fatigue eat at them so constantly that the prisoners don’t dare raise their voices, even when the guards are absent. They are truly “withered trees in the heart of the desert,” cut off from their life forces effectively that they can do nothing but rot. The Gestapo have broken their spirits so completely that they choose to submit, rather than face physical and psychological torture.
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Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Nothing But Ashes:
During Rosh Hashanah, many of the Jews pray together, but Eliezer no longer believes in any of the Jewish holidays or the Jewish faith altogether. With an ironic metaphor, the story depicts Eliezer’s declining relationship with God:
But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes now, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.
Eliezer’s belief in God perishes as he watches an innocent boy die slowly by hanging. Eliezer not only completely loses his faith in God, but he also loses the need for God. Eliezer feels stronger that God, who he feels has been weak to allow so many Jews to be horribly killed. Despite being “nothing but ashes,” tortured and starved and scarred beyond repair, Eliezer is strong enough to recognize God’s weakness. The juxtaposition between being “alone,” “without love or mercy,” and yet being “stronger than this Almighty” is ironic, perhaps even paradoxical.
In Eliezer’s eyes, all that made him human before—desire, faith, love, companionship—allowed him to be weak. Every death and every moment of pain was an arrow to the heart, a blow to his soul. Now that he no longer has these human necessities and traits, he can no longer be affected with such intensity. He is a rock, emotionless and unbreakable, unaffected by the Gestapo, yet whittled down over time, all the same.
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Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—A Contemplating Corpse:
In the end, Eliezer is rescued from Buchenwald, fatherless and starved. Finally able to look at himself in a mirror, Eliezer uses a metaphor to describe what he sees looking back at him:
One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.
From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me.
The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.
Though all Eliezer can think of is eating, he gets some kind of food poisoning following his rescue. Hospitalized for two weeks, he is on the brink of death once more. When he sees himself in the mirror—the first time since being taken from the ghetto in Hungary—he sees a corpse staring back at him. Eliezer cannot help but feel like the product of death, no longer a living person after all that he has witnessed and endured. One cannot experience so much death without dying oneself.
Eliezer also separates his first-person narration from this third-person corpse “contemplating” him, as if they are two different people. After torture and starvation, he feels no connection to his body, this thing that has survived against all odds. The only way to survive, the memoir suggests through this metaphor, was to sever oneself into mind, soul, and body and to let the latter two disintegrate into nothing.
Related Themes:
