“I knew that our suffering changes us. But I didn’t know it could also destroy others.”
“I told him what I had never told anyone. My chidhood, my mystic dreams, my religious passions, my memories of German concentration camps, my belief that I was now just a messenger of the dead among the living.”
Content warnings: death, suicide, sexual assault
In Elie Wiesel’s The Accident, protagonist Eliezer is a survivor of the Holocaust, where he lost his grandmother, mother, and others in the death camps. He is numb to the love of Kathleen, the woman who loves him and wants to make him happy. He carries death with him always, as well as visions of his grandmother, turned to ashes alongside his mother. His grandmother is a vision of love, security, and acceptance, but it does not penetrate his dance with death. To the living who love him, he is cold and cruel many times, then lies to them in an effort to provide a warmth and comfort he doesn’t feel.
On the way to the movies with Kathleen, Eliezer is hit by a cab and almost dies. He wakes up in the hospital with a raging fever and his body in a cast. Most of the bones on the left side of his body are broken. He has a doctor, Dr. Russell, who takes a special interest in him, and who confronts him about his lack of will to live. The implication is the doctor wants to know: was it an accident or did Eliezer try to die by suicide? Eliezer assures him it was an accident, but the reader suspects something more.
In another conversation with Eliezer, Dr. Russell relates that when he is in the operating room, he can feel the patient working with him to save their life. He is furious that he did not feel that with Eliezer, that Eliezer did not participate in his own survival while under the knife. This is a thread that winds through the entire book–Eliezer cannot connect, to most others (with the exception of one friend), and to himself. He is silent a great deal of the time, but then will have outpourings of his story to strangers. He also listens to a stranger’s story of the Holocaust, a young prostitute who was given to the Nazis and raped repeatedly starting when she was 12 years old. In the face of such horror, Eliezer calls her a saint, which echoes an earlier experience of his when Kathleen calls him a saint for his own survival. He laughs wildly at Kathleen, but the young woman, told the same, erupts in fury. They are both deeply damaged, but the young woman’s anger is more alive than Eliezer’s disconnection and empty laughter.
In the introduction, Wiesel says Eliezer is not him, but a product of his imagination that is also informed by Wiesel’s own memories of the Holocaust. I couldn’t help but conflate the author and his character though, especially since Eliezer’s name is so close to Elie Wiesel’s. There is only a fraction of hope in The Accident, mostly conveyed by Eliezer’s artist friend Gyula, who both understands not wanting to truly live life, but tells Eliezer, “The dead have no place down here. They must leave us in peace…You should know that the dead, because they are no longer free, are no longer able to suffer. Only the living can. Kathleen is alive. I am alive. You must think of us. Not of them.” At the end Eliezer contemplates the way he lies as a way of supporting those he wishes to love, and the reader is not sure at the end if he will ever transcend that or reunite with the living.
