Twilight By Elie Wiesel: A Literary Analysis

The relationship between madness and prophecy has long been a source of contention in literary circles. These two concepts are difficult to tackle as both are connected to an abstract mystical world that can give shape and meaning to human existence and truth about life. After the Holocaust, people seriously began questioning the existence of a Supreme Deity and the lack of divine intervention to such devastating and cruel war. As a result, the concepts of prophecy and madness are intertwined in several Holocaust stories. Such complexities lead naturally to the question of how to differentiate between the two concepts, a question that continues to perplex specialists.
In the novel Twilight (1988) by Elie Wiesel, the protagonist Raphael, a professor of mysticism, embarks on a quest to discover the relationship between madness and prophecy. This paper uses Wiesel’s Twilight as a focal point to examine the concepts of madness and prophecy from historical, literary, and philosophical perspectives. The paper also explores the relationship between a madman and a prophet. In Twilight, Raphael takes a scholarly adventure to the Mountain Clinic to

explore madness and prophecy in several patients, in the hope that will he can gain closure and perhaps an answer to his past and present struggles, including the whereabouts of his missing friend Pedro. He meets with several patients who claim to be Biblical prophets and even one patient who claims to be God. In this paper, my thesis is that distinguishing between madness and prophecy requires drawing on the historical and philosophical distinctions between them. As such, the paper focuses on examining both concepts using Maimonides’ philosophical views on prophecy and madness, to show the similarities that have existed in madness and prophecy, throughout the ages. To this end, this paper first provides some background, in the form of: a short biography of Twilight’s author, Wiesel; a brief literature review of work done on this topic; an exploration of author Wiesel’s views on the madness; and a brief discussion on Wiesel’s trilogy Night, Dawn, and Day, and how those stories illuminate several aspects related to madness and prophecy that are later seen in Twilight. Finally, this paper reviews Maimonides’ philosophical classifications of prophecy and then brings it all together with a discussion of Twilight.
Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in the small town of Sighet, now a part of Romania. Raised in a well-educated family, he was the third of four children and the only boy. Shlomo Wiesel, his father, owned a small grocery store and was a community leader who helped many Polish Jews escape from the Germans. Shlomo was arrested for this and sent to prison, but later released; Elie learned from his father a sense of humanitarianism. From a young age, Elie started reading and writing religious texts, and started studying the Kabbalah despite his father’s hesitation that Elie was too young. His father finally allowed Elie to study the Kabbalah but only if he continued studying the Talmud and its commentaries and learned modern Hebrew. During this time, Wiesel first met Moshe, a poor man of Sighet, and the first madman Elie had met, when Moshe joined the Wiesel’s family for the Sabbath meals. Wiesel later met several madmen, and he always assumed that they spoke with wisdom and possessed a clear vision and knowledge of life.
Wiesel’s family was deported by the Nazis in April 1944 with more than fifteen thousand Jews from Sighet (Sternlicht 4) and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Elie's mother and younger sister died in the gas chamber immediately after their arrival. Elie managed to stay with his father, but was separated from his older sisters. Elie was around fourteen years old when he was sent to Auschwitz. Despite the inhumane treatment and the hard work they were forced to do, Elie and his father managed to stay alive together for many months. Unfortunately, his father died of dysentery and severe hunger shortly before the camp was liberated on April 11, 1945. The death of his father, left Elie feeling helpless for his inability to keep his father safe from the Nazis’ torture, and with guilt for surviving when so many others had died.
Immediately after the liberation, Elie went to France, settled there and was reunited with his two older sisters.

Elie started to learn French at school and fell in love with the language of literature and freedom. In Paris, he worked as a journalist until 1956 when he decided to emigrate to the United States. He settled in New York, staying there for the rest of his life, and continued his life career as a writer, publishing in French his first autobiographical book, La Nuit (Night), to document his experience during the Holocaust and make it accessible to people around the world. Francois Mauriac, a great French writer, had encouraged Wiesel “to break his own self-imposed, ten-year silence after his release from Auschwitz” (Fisher 111). In 1969, Elie married Marion Rose, who later translated most of his books in

English.
Wiesel devoted much of life to fighting indifference, intolerance, and genocide worldwide. He received many honorary awards from higher learning institutions, and in 1972 began a career as Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City University of New York, and . He authored approximately sixty books in various genres and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for his contributions to human rights against racism, violence, inequality, and oppression. Elie Wiesel died June 2, 2016, the loss of a great twentieth-century Jewish writer.
Literature Review
A number of scholars have discussed madness and prophecy in the past several decades, and a considerable variety of literature relevant to this topic. In Shriek of Silence (1992), David Patterson differentiates between madness as a clinical condition and as a mystical condition, supporting his argument with Elie Wiesel’s distinction of the two: “[the] clinical madman isolates himself from the world while [the] mystical madman brings the Messiah in him” (quoted in: Shriek of Silence 112). Robert McAfee Brown classifies the madness in Wiesel’s works into three types: 1) the “moral madness” of the Hebrew prophets; 2) what Wiesel calls mystical madness; and, 3) the clinical madness that is harmful to the madman and his society (Messenger to All Humanity 141). In the same vein, Brown notes that Wiesel writes almost exclusively about mystical madness or madness of the prophets (Twilight: Madness 180). Patterson further discusses the notion of madness, attributing it to the beginning of the creation of humans and language, thus arguing that the soul “can do very well without the body,” and that it is “precisely the disease that breeds madness in the splitting of the self” (Shriek of Silence 112). He concludes that a madman’s speech, therefore, “contains aspects of prophecy” (120).
A more recent study supports a similar conclusion. Rosette Lamont affirms that the mystic is not aware of the revelation of his vision and interpretation “unlike that of the prophet, who conveys a clear message” (Lamont 131). However, both mystical madness and prophecy have a profound effect on a person’s soul. Lamont stresses that the result of both “appears akin to madness” to the outsider (131). According to the Midrash , madness is not an insanity, but rather a departure from reality to seek an ultimate truth (Lamont 134). Irving Abrahamson finds similar results when he analyses Wiesel’s understanding of madness as representing the divine presence of God, the Shekhinah (Abrahamson 172). Similarly, Patterson notes that the “linking with the word that signifies the presence of God is articulated in nearly all Holocaust novels dealing with madness” (Shriek of Silence 120). Therefore, “silence” and “word” are both common traits of madness and prophecy namely in modern Jewish Literature. Albert Friedlander stresses that those who still “remember the Holocaust are viewed with suspicion. They are thought mad” (Friedlander 20). This is clearly seen in the madmen cases in Twilight, in which Wiesel directly and indirectly reminds readers of the Holocaust and the plain truth that those madmen speak. Wiesel is, therefore, giving his story a Biblical dimension to manifest “itself to the inquiring mind” regarding the relationship between madness and prophecy in our modern times (21).
Wiesel’s Views on Madness and Prophecy
Madness is seen in many forms in most of Wiesel’s works, starting with his first literary work, Night. The madman in Night appears as Moshe the Beadle, a poor drunken man who teaches the narrator, Eliezer, the Kabbalah. Moshe appears in several works and he is often seen as a visionary who could foretell the future. In a seminal paper, Wiesel states that he likes madmen and he writes so that he does not go mad (Why I Write). He views madmen as having a clear vision and a deeper understanding of life.
Wiesel is interested in mystical madness rather than clinical madness. He writes about “the madness of the prophets, the madness of those who see life in such a different perspective from the rest of us that the rest of us become uneasy in their presence and seek to incarcerate them or, if necessary, put them to death” (Brown 180). All of Wiesel’s works seem to start and end with questions. To him, these questions lead readers to embark on a journey into a more mystical quest. The characters in his stories are somewhat isolated and they tell stories that people may not want to hear or refuse to believe because they feel afraid that such stories are true.