86 pages • 2 hours read
Harry MulischThe Assault
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Dice
At the moment of the assault, Anton holds a dice in his hand, which he is about to throw in the process of playing a board game with his family. The dice then moves through the story as a motif. In the midst of the commotion following the assault, Anton puts the dice in his pocket. The almost instinctual act of preserving the dice is filled with poignancy, as he will never again return to the board game: his life is in the process of being irrevocably ripped from him. The dice demonstrates the abruptness of the assault and the totality of its rapid destruction: one moment Anton is peacefully playing a board game with his family, and the next they are being executed. He also rediscovers the dice in his pocket as he leaves Nazi custody in the company of his uncle—and the dice also symbolizes the utter and complete loss of Anton’s former life. This is perhaps why Anton fixates on a lighter with a dice pattern during a panic attack that he later suffers as a man in his 30s. In that scene, the dice and all that it symbolizes has become subliminally buried within his psyche and can only serve as a dim flashpoint for his anxiety attack. At that point, Anton has deeply dug his heels into his coping mechanism of repression—but still, the reminder of the dice is enough to send him reeling. The motif of the dice therefore metaphorically symbolizes both Anton’s irrevocably lost former life as well as his repressive and suppressive methods of coping with his trauma.
Truus Coster
Truus Coster is a symbol of moral and psychological salvation. On the night of the assault, she provides Anton with a strong, compassionate, loving, and brave motherly presence. She also offers him nuggets of wisdom which will come to serve as the key to his own psychological reconciliation with the trauma of the assault. She tells him that he must never relinquish his own humanity in the face of Fascism and also that all parties involved in the murder of his family did solely what they did and nothing else. These flashpoints of insight prove to be indispensable to Anton’s journey—he never loses his own sense of compassion and understanding for both the rational motivations and absurdity of the humans surrounding him. And he also ultimately does not blame the Resistance nor even the Kortewegs for the murder of his family: Nazi forces executed his family and no one else. Truus’s saint-like presence within the narrative anchors and grounds the moral truths that will ultimately serve as the resolution for Anton’s journey.
Women and Men
Throughout the narrative, men resolutely symbolize the brutality, cruelty, and absurdity of war. Whether it be the Nazi official with the scar on his cheek or Takes, it is men—on both sides of the conflict—who bring terror and destruction. On the other hand, the feminine figures of Truus, Sandra, and Saskia moor Anton to the goodness of life, and they thus run counter to the masculine forces of war.
Nature
At various points in the narrative, Mulisch depicts how nature is basically indifferent to the affairs of humans. By doing this, Mulisch maintains a thematic focus on ever larger and larger contexts—including the context of the earth itself. Through the motif of an indifferent natural world, he tempers the grand and profound meaning-making that humans (and Anton, in particular) are engaged with. The motif of an indifferent nature, wholly uninvested in human affairs, helps Mulisch to insert a thread of absurdity into his narrative. Although readers are meant to be engaged and moved by Anton’s journey, through this motif, they are also asked to consider the larger insignificance of humanity in relation to the cosmos and nature, which know no moral distinctions.
