Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Love and Hate in the Name of Light
The contrast between light and dark is a significant motif in The Assault. In the passage on page 38, Anton is in solitary confinement with a woman, and they are discussing the importance of light in both love and hate. The mystery woman tells Anton how she views light. This passage explains how light exists inside of people that are in love, and presents light as a tangible object. Light is described as an object that is "clinging to trees right after a sunset: the magical sort of light" (Mulisch 38). Next, she reveals the fact that hate is darkness. But she soon contradicts her own point by saying "And yet we've got to hate Fascists, but that's considered perfectly all right" (Mulisch 38). She explains this by saying that we hate them in the "name of the light," which means that Fascists are hated by everyone because of the need for peace and love. They are hated because of their unjust hate. Then she compares the dark hate of the Fascists with the hate toward the Fascists. She tells us that because of their reasons for hate, the hate of the people is better than that of the hate of the Fascists. This passage tells us that since love is similar to light, one must sacrifice his/her love in order to develop the hate towards the Fascists. Through this process, the magic present in love is lost, and we become similar to the people we are fighting.
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1. Your sentence structure is very well written, but I would write your sentences more specifically.
ReplyDeleteYour second sentence sounds more like you are summarizing and not talking about the topic.
The sentence I would want to change the most is "But she soon..." I would not have started that sentence with "but" instead you should have said something like, contradictory to this she then says.
2. Make sure that you underline the name of the novel in your paragraph like in your first sentence.
Try to avoid a plot summary and instead analyze the text more, you used "she tells us" a lot in your paragraph.
3.I really liked how you brought the whole piece together at the end. I also liked how you notified what motif you were speaking of and how it correlated with the passage.