Elie Wiesel and Oedipus: themes of tragedy and suffering

Elie Wiesel & Oedipus

Faith in the face of evil: Elie Wiesel's Night and Sophocles' "Oedipus at Colonus"

Elie Wiesel's short, searing memoir Night and the Greek tragedian Sophocles "Oedipus at Colonus" depict the central protagonists confronting absolute, utter personal horror in a world seemingly absent of any moral center. Both Elie Wiesel and Oedipus face some of the worst circumstances any human beings can conceive of -- the death of a parent, the death of their place in society, the death of their concept of God, and the death of their concept of self. In Night, Elie Wiesel faces man's inhumanity to man in the form of the concentration camps of Auschwitz. In "Oedipus at Colonus," Oedipus confronts the end of his existence after a lifetime of misery. Wiesel must accept the death of his father and witnesses an attempt to eradicate his entire people, civilization, and culture by a supposedly civil society. Both men suffer unjustly -- Oedipus never did anything 'wrong,' at least not when he was condemned as a baby to murder his father and marry his mother. But events still conspire to bring these actions about. Similarly, Wiesel never committed any wrong actions, but merely because he was a Jew, he became the subject of murderous persecution. These individuals must ask, and try to answer the question -- what to make of a world of suffering?

The struggles of both men against forces larger than themselves, like the force of fate and the tide of history, highlight the arbitrary nature of earthly, divine rewards. A simplistic understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition suggests that human beings who behave well and honor the gods are rewarded, and those who do not are punished. However, Wiesel's experience flies in the face of such understanding, and even Oedipus, who could be accused of hubristically assuming that he could escape his fate, suffers a punishment disproportionately harsh in comparison to his crime of arrogantly believing he can avoid his fate. Both stories, one mythological and one tragically real, illustrate how human experience flies in the face of easy cause-and-effect analysis.

It should be noted, of course, both men worship different gods. One man is a Greek from pagan times, the other a 20th century Orthodox Jew. Wiesel's Judeo-Christian god is a creator god, so he must grapple with the question of how a God that created a theoretically good world could allow the existence of evil in such a world. Oedipus' Zeus did not create the world, but came after the world as a child of Titans, and no Olympian is all-powerful. Zeus merely reigns over his fellow Olympians, and even he is subject to the forces of the Fates. Despite these theological differences, both Wiesel and Oedipus are condemned to suffer, for reasons that are obscure to themselves, and obscure to the reader. Their theological differences motivate both men to take different interpretations of their suffering -- Wiesel must understand how the good God he worshipped allows for evil, while it is accepted in the pagan schema of thought that powerful gods can capriciously do good or evil, and truly pious men must submit to the will of the gods.

The tales show that suffering changes the character of an individual, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but that suffering always forces an individual to critically evaluate his or her relationship to God and the world. As a young man in "Oedipus Rex," Oedipus was an arrogant individual, and lashed out in a violent quarrel in the street -- this is how he killed old King Laius. Once, Oedipus had tremendous confidence in his ability to act intelligently and in defiance of the will of the gods. This is why he fled his adoptive parents' home, and confidently volunteered to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. Because he believed he had the ability to outwit fate he confidently issued a proclamation to Thebes, telling the suffering citizens he would be sure to punish whomever was the cause of the plague -- and unwittingly condemning himself. But in "Oedipus at Colonus," Oedipus is a humbled man. He realizes that no matter how brilliant, strong, or crafty they may be that human beings are merely playthings of the gods.

In Night, rather than being morally reformed and educated by the processes of suffering, the young Wiesel grows embittered. The ancient Greeks did not possess a concept of a 'good' god at all, merely a powerful, willful, and capricious collection of beings who were often at odds and played different favorites with different mortals. Merely because he is treated poorly by fate Oedipus does not doubt the existence of a divine force in the world, only his ability to outwit that fate. If he did doubt this, in attempting to defy his fate, his suffering eradicates any doubt about his vulnerability in the face of the gods. But Wiesel begins from a point of belief. Even though Wiesel suffered anti-Semitism and suffering as a young man in the ghetto, he still had the sense that the Judeo-Christian God was good, because of the reinforcement he received from his father, his tight-knit Jewish community and his own religious studies. All of this changes as, persecuted for his faith, Wiesel begins to lose his faith as he sees his family and community destroyed. Significantly, Night shifts from being told from the perspective of the community as a 'we,' to a story of Wiesel and his father as a duo as they suffer the horrors of the camps, and is finally narrowed to a story told by an 'I.'