The Assault By Harry Mulisch Analysis

Tragedy impacts each human being differently. Some are able to forgive and forget, some become angry and seek vengeance of some sort, while others bury those feelings deep within themselves and become apathetic. In The Assault by Harry Mulisch uses careful diction, apprehensive tone, striking oxymoron, and dark irony to show that while many may have been involved in the same tragedy, their roles in the tragedy and how they handle grief from it create a different outcome for each.
Anton was a child when the Nazi collaborator, Fake Ploeg, was assassinated on his street. Consequentially, his family was killed and Anton buried his grief deep within himself, not wanting to evaluate his feelings and work through his grief. Even into his adult life,

he has not seemed to process this grief, but he has sudden bursts of emotion through panic attacks: “ He had the feeling of having just skirted something fatal, something that now seemed to his a dangerous confusion, dizzying cerebral cobwebs caused by sunstroke.

He must forget them and go to sleep (131).” The tone Mulisch uses in this passage can be described as very tense. The first sentence is very long, but separated equally by commas. This gives the sense of being rushed, and not being able to fully stop for breath. The syntax of this sentence convincingly portrays the feeling of having a panic attack. Everything is whirring by too quickly to wrap one’s mind around and it is nearly impossible to take a calming breath. The authors diction also supports how Anton has pushed the memories of the assault far back in his mind. The “ dizzying cerebral cobwebs” are being brushed away by the sunstroke, or in literal terms,

Anton is remembering the pain and emotions that have yet to be confronted. These cobwebs are dizzying beccause the have come back to the surface of Anton’s mind so quickly, much like the dizziness one feels when jumping up after sitting or lying down for an extended period of time. Even though Anton has become a successful doctor, with a beautiful wife and child, he is still haunted. It is because of pushing these memories back that he is able to focus on other aspects of his life.
Other characters were in some way, more fortunate than Anton, but their loss of loved ones ruined the rest of their lives. Fake Ploeg only lost his father, but the rest of his childhood and adolescence was lost to responsibility. The responsibility to care for and provide for a grieving mother and two sisters prevented him from ever being able to pursue a college education, and he ended up less fortunate than Anton: “ ‘So that’s the difference, right? We’re in the same class, your parents were shot, but you’re doing medical studies all the same where as my father was shot and I repair water heaters.’ ‘But your mother is alive’, said Anton promptly, ‘and your sisters too’. Now he weighted his words carefully. They were on dangerous ground. ‘Besides, isn’t there some difference between your father’s and my parent’s death?’ (88)” This is the first interaction between Fake and Anton, since the night of the assault. In this quote, the fates of both characters are revealed: Fake is a repair-man and Anton is a medical student. Fake immediately seems to detest the fact that Anton is more successful than him. Later in their interaction, we see just how angry Fake is when Mulisch describes him as “asking aggressively (88)” and later he calls Anton a bastard. The climax of their conversation appears when Fake becomes violent: “He turned toward him…and suddenly grabbed the stone…Fake took aim and threw it straight at the mirror…Surveying the damage with a pounding heart, he [Anton] heard Fake’s footsteps run down the stairs. (92,93)” This quote shows an anger within Fake that we fail to see with a bitter and even apathetic Anton. Fake’s loss and his fate could be debated on whether or not it was worse than Anton’s, but it was decidedly different because only Fake’s father was killed.
Anton is bitter and almost numb, Fake is full of anger, and Takes is lost in nostalgia.

His role in the assault cost him his brother and the love of his life, and he never seemed to recover from the loss of the latter, as Anton saw when he visited Take’s house and saw the obsession Takes had with the war: “Was this the reason why the map was hanging there? Not because of an insidious nostalgia for the War, but because her [Truus] mouth was imprinted on it? (137)” This quote shows just how lost Takes is in the past. He is consumed in it, he thinks of nothing else, and it makes him miserable. For Takes and the others that invested their lives in the war, they might as well be dead with the rest of their comrades, because they have no interest in the advancements of the world around them. Takes only seems to talk about the past: a Nazi war criminal has been released from prison and one of his old conspirator friends killed himself. He doesn’t care about how Anton feels about the war, and pushes him to the very limit asking Anton about Truus. Anton, as discussed previously, wants nothing to do with remembering the night Ploeg was assassinated, and gets increasingly more and more uncomfortable with Takes. Both of these men lost loved ones in the war, but because Takes was older, he was not able to gather his life up again; the defeat of the Nazis was his life, and when they were defeated, his life metaphorically

ended.
Anton, Fake, and Takes were all part of the assault, and each of them lost a great deal. Anton, who seemingly lost the most, had the most successful life after the war, but he had a great deal of mental and emotional damage that could never heal. Fake lost only his father, but because of this, a great deal of weight was put on his small shoulders, and many of life’s opportunities were snatched away from him. Takes’s entire life was sunk into the war, and when it ended, he essentially became a nobody. War affects everyone, and makes a victim out of most. Each living thing has it’s own way of recovering from tragedy, and it is the way that one handles it that decides one’s fate.