Wiesel, Elie. Twilight. Penguin, 2013.
article of reference:
- Roth, John K. “From Night to Twilight: A Philosopher's Reading of Elie Wiesel.” Religion & Literature, vol. 24, no. 1, 1992, pp. 59–73. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40059499.
- Twilight: A Philosopher's Reading of Elie Wiesel… by John Roth…
- A. Roy Eckardt. Divine Incongruity: Comedy and Tragedy in a Post-Holocaust World. First Published January 1, 1992.
Twilight, originally published in 1988 in French as Le crépuscule, au loin, is a novel by Elie Wiesel. Twilight is the fictional story of a Holocaust survivor named Raphael Lipkin who is now a psychologist living in America. He visits a psychiatric ward called "The Mountain Clinic," where he interviews several psychiatric patients who believe themselves to be various characters from the Old Testament. Interwoven with these accounts are Raphael's own memories of his life before and during the Holocaust
Twilight is a story that asks about the domain of madness. John Roth sees Twilight as complementing Night. He goes on to say: “All of Nights sequels explore how the world might be mended. Nonetheless in the order of things dawn, day, and especially twilight leave night close by.” (Page 62 of Roth article.)
Twilight is also a novel about friendship with a person named Pedro. (A friendship with another Pedro happens in The Town Beyond the Wall.
In order to read Wiesel philosophically, Roth says there are rhythms in Wiesel’s writings that one can become sensitized to. They are:
- (The Holocaust demands interrogation and calls everything into question. Traditional ideas and acquired values, philosophical systems and social theories - all must be revised in the shadow of Birkenau (Foreword ix)… “and the first lesson Wiesel teaches is that the Holocaust is an unrivaled measure because nothing exceeds its power to evoke the question Why? That authority puts everything else to the test. (Page 63 of Roth article.)
- The questions remain questions. (Page 63 of Roth article.)
- "And yet – and yet. (Page 64 of Roth article.)
- 'There is a link between language and /i/*"("Exile" 1) (Page 653 of Roth article.)
- "Rationalism is a failure and betrayal" (Use" 2:79). (Page 65 of Roth article.)
Below the info comes from: http://articles.latimes.com/1988-06-19/books/bk-7884_1_elie-wiesel
Not all the characters with whom Raphael interacts express biblical delusions, however, and these figures provide the link between the ancient past and modern history. Zelig, for instance, spends all his time staring at the sky above, refusing to speak. Eventually--by joining him in his solitary obsession--Raphael gains this silent man's trust, and he learns Zelig's holy purpose: to find the vanished bodies of Holocaust victims. "After all," he says, "they couldn't have been erased like a typographical error. Or could they?"
While Raphael is absorbing the teachings of his purported research subjects, he is simultaneously attempting to come to terms with his memories--of his family in the Galician town of Rovidok, of the ways in which he lost his parents and siblings, of his friendship with and subsequent separation from Pedro, the loving substitute father who brought him out of his war-ravaged homeland and helped him to start his life anew. He muses as well over the break-up of his marriage, which is still painful to him.
These reflective moments are the most tender segments of "Twilight," for they bring to life the small moments that, by their very simplicity, characterize the beauty, heroism, and terrible sadness of the human condition. They also get at what appear to be Wiesel's principal concerns in this novel: how, finally, to come to grips with the meaning of the Holocaust in his own life and how to reconcile the heroism of the victims, the viciousness of their persecutors, and some vision of God and Jewish history. Is the Bible obsolete? Is it madness to have faith in a divine spirit when confronted by cruelty that is, unfortunately, no longer incredible?
These are not new questions, and Wiesel's answer comes about more by metaphor than by the usual techniques of conventional story-telling. One clue appears in Raphael's final conversation at the sanatorium, as he is about to leave without having discovered who has been defaming his beloved Pedro, or why. In the garden of the Mountain Clinic, Raphael comes across no less than God Himself. After pouring out his anger and frustration, he comes to realize that imagination can create its own reality. Perhaps the madmen who believe that they are Adam, Cain, or even God are as sane as those who believe in the existence of their biblical originals.
