Reflection pg 106-118

This excerpt of the book “The Assault” focuses on various themes, which ties into the motifs and symbols.  Yet one theme is the main block around which everything else is build up on: FATE, to this the motif of light and stones and the themes AVOIDANCE and UNDERSTANDING are involve as well.

Anton’s live is made up of fate. Everything happens to be a coincidence, which leads him back to his dark past. This apparently was also all a coincidence, “one can always help fate along a bit”(114), and this shows that the assault was never meant to end in a way that his family got murdered. There happened more to the assault, which was beyond the control of the family Steenwijk.

In these 13 pages, Anton meets the guy who has shot Ploeg at the funeral of a resistance member. Both have a different understanding of the whole scenario, where as Anton has a rather limited knowledge of the particular night. “Care, care... It can’t be changed now, even if I understood it” (117), this shows how Anton has been avoiding his past and never really tried to understand. Through fate he got back to his and is now in a conversation with the murderer of Ploeg (also called Gijs), which leads to a conclusion that there is more to the assault than just the assault.

The mood of the conversation or flow is a couple of times reflected through light. Right at the beginning, when Anton by accident follows a conversation, he jumps right back  “deep inside the tunnel of the past” (108). The tunnel symbolizing darkness, the darkness he is trying to avoid and barely knows about.  But then again this is the light of the darkness- for Anton it seems like a fairy tale (110) meeting the man with whom it all began, he wants to know what happened, because now he has the chance to find out more. Still he tries to avoid.

Another scene where light is strongly emphasized is when Gijs is justifying himself, but doesn’t quite to whom. “…Who exists? The dead. The friends who have died.”(112) Here a small cloud covers the sun-darkness. “The flowers of the new grave look bleached”(112), the grave symbolizing stones, which therefore emblematizes memory, the memory of the murdered family with all its regret and sadness. Who’s death they are trying to understand years later, emphasized by the reoccurrence of light from one moment to another.

All in all it’s a sunny day, where Anton and Gijs are facing the mystery that there’s more to the assault. Even though Anton “never wondered about it” (117) and always tried to avoid, Gijs is desperate to find out.

“…there was more to it. Something happened there.” (118)