Short story analysis and literary interpretation

WATCH

Elie Wiesel's dramatic monologue lets the reader see him as the young Jewish boy in a Hungarian village and as a mature man who revisits that past, in memory and in fact. The narrative is especially poignant as it begins just after Wiesel's bar mitzvah, the formal declaration of his entry into manhood -- the time when he assumed all the responsibilities that adulthood can press up a thirteen-year-old boy. From that jubilant ceremony, Wiesel is plunged into unimaginable horror. The link between Wiesel's two lives is a gold watch that he received in honor of his successful transition into adulthood. Yet the young man is no more able to protect his family from the Holocaust than were his elders. Their collective wisdom -- developed over a lifetime of being Jewish in a land where their religion was a liability and the practice of their religion was a death sentence -- was insufficient to grant the foresight and feed the resolve to abandon their homeland.

The references to the watch as a past life, or a life that is passing by, use both metonymy and symbolism. The use of watch is metonymy, in that, the watch maintains a vigil when Wiesel cannot. The watch, as material things so often do, survives the family and a way of life. And when Wiesel returns to his native place, the watch is there to greet him -- it, too, as a survivor. Wiesel's gold watch is symbolic of the treasure that a young man is to his family and community, of the life he forcibly left behind, and the passage of time during which Wiesel lived apart from his home. The watch, in Wiesel's words, offered the promise of "an epilogue" to his childhood. He could not dig out the earth the closure that he sought. The elapsed time could not be recaptured, nor could the course of events be changed any more than turning back the clock brings anything more than a virtual time -- not a time that was, but a representation of a time that had already passed. The effort of digging up the watch with his unprotected hands, using his fingers instead of tools, is symbolic of his survival of the Holocaust. He survived by chance and because he was hardy, resilient, and determined. With the same mindset, Wiesel attacks the earth to take back what was stolen from him -- his watch and the normal life he anticipated. It is ironic that Wiesel is driven to return the watch to its burial place, in part, because he is disconsolate that he has committed his first theft. Even with all that has been stolen from him, Wiesel's orthodox lessons will not release him. The irony is deepened by the fact that he returns the watch to the very people who could have looted his family home and whose officials drove the Jewish citizens from their own town.

Wiesel wrestles with his desire to see and hold the watch again. He fears that the watch will reflect the ruined state of his life -- and that of his loved ones and his former community of acquaintances -- from the point of his departure from his native town to the endless stream of losses he accumulated as he lived a life apart from what he had been taught to trust and love. Wiesel perceives the unavoidable dichotomy: The watch -- buried in a garden -- as it was, could bring forth a new life. Yet the soil serves also a cemetery into which all his family members buried their past lives. The thought of resurrecting what is buried in a cemetery prepares Wiesel for his encounter with the condition of the watch.

By first burying the gold watch in the garden of his family's homestead, Wiesel created an everlasting link between his old and new ways of existing -- the watch became a witness to the changes that came to his native town in his absence. The personification of the watch extends beyond the vigil it maintained in Wiesel's absence to embrace the possibility of a new life together. Wiesel envisions the watch restored by the best jeweler in the world -- a jeweler who could wipe out the trauma experienced by the watch and the lonely path it endured to reach its decrepit state.