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 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,

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