Elie Wiesel and The last emperor

Elie Wisel/The Last Emperor

The Last Emperor, Night, and "Oedipus Rex"

Ignorance is not bliss. This principle is illustrated in "The Last Emperor" when the young boy, riding his bicycle around the walled city of his palatial home, finds himself face-to-face with the sharp sword of a guard. The boy is trapped in the walled world of Plato's cave, a world that is not immediately recognizable as such, because it is beautiful and because he has every one of his material desires attend to by servants. However, the boy is not happy because he is not realizing the true purpose of every human life, which is to live in a free and independent fashion. He also has no knowledge of his subjects and the lives they lead. At this early stage, the boy is still gazing at the shadow-puppets on the walls of Plato's cave, only dimly apprehending this is not reality. However, his desire to leave the city shows that he still has the instincts of a human being and a philosopher in the Platonic tradition.

After he leaves, however, he mistakes many false things for the real, Platonic world of the forms, such as Western pleasures along the lines of wine, women and song. At this point, realizing the unnaturalness of his original cloistered existence, he has achieved some dim enlightenment but he is still mistaking the world behind the shadows, the puppets casting the shadows as 'the real.' This is also true not only of himself but the communists who attempt to indoctrinate him in the 'one true philosophy.' The Last Emperor gains enlightenment as a commoner, not because of the rightness of communism but because he perceives the transient and arbitrary nature of existence, being a gardener in a place where he was, as a young and ignorant boy, where he was once treated as a god but prohibited from living as a free human being. He sees the impermanence of all human ideology, and realizes that the ideal world of the forms has nothing to do with the material, man-created world.

Rather than beginning in a place of perfect bliss, Elie Wiesel in Night begins in a place of horror, the ghetto of World War II, and descends to even more horrible conditions in the bowels of the concentration camps. His enlightenment comes when he is forced to be fully self-reliant. He realizes that he cannot depend upon his father or upon anyone else for omniscient knowledge, and that he is left to his own devices and beliefs in a world without morality. Like the cave-dweller, Elie eventually realizes that the material world does not offer moral answers; rather moral answers come from his own mind, sense of fortitude, and faith.

Even Oedipus experiences this final, sinking revelation, after living as an ignorant but happy king of Thebes. Oedipus thought he was wise because he believed he had escaped his fate to kill his father and marry his mother and had solved the riddle of the Sphinx. At the end of Sophocles' tragedy, the former king blinds himself in horror that he has fulfilled the Delphic oracle's promise and also because he knows that he is unable as a human being to manipulate the material world where he dwells, he is only a plaything of the gods, just like the Last Emperor and Elie Wiesel will learn in their stories, which come after the myth of Oedipus in human time but reinforce the same principles. Only one's moral fiber and goodness can be trusted, not what transpires in the world.