'Paradoxical Doubleness in Elie Wiesel s Night

oft quoted statement "if the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the Epistle, the Renaissance the Sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony" (9) captures the centrality of the notion of bearing witness to key formal developments within twentieth century literature. Although this new genre underlines a range of issues, such as the importance of authorship or the author's relationship to history, or the historical text, it problematizes the issue of "identification". Yet the problem with the issue of identification in Holocaust testimonies is that the form encourages identification, as it is commonly written in realist style of the nineteenth century, while the content prohibits it, as otherwise it would generalize the experience of the protagonist. Robert Eaglestone calls this problem as "paradoxical doubleness" (119). This article takes the cue from Eaglestone's proposition to suggest that in Wiesel's memoir Night, the use of a child protagonist opens a path for the reader to identify with the protagonist, as his narrative voice lacks self-consciousness, and thus is characterized by its objectivity, observant and henceforth, didactic, imitating a 19 th century realist discourse. Yet he intentionally disrupts the moments of reality with fantasy, which makes it his own personal experience thus avoiding any kind of identification. In consequence, this article will claim that Wiesel both encourages and discourages identification, so that he will both testify to the reality of the camps while creating a powerful personal story. By so doing, he is able to find a resolution to the fundamental debate of how to narrate camp experiences that are beyond language.