The Lightness and the Darkness

Pg. 38: “In the poem I wanted…so we become a little bit unlike ourselves.”

In this passage of The Assault, Harry Mulisch compares the Rebels and Fascists with lightness and darkness. The lightness and darkness comparison are used to create imagery within the passage. Moreover, the lightness and darkness and representative of the feeling of love and hate. He describes that lightness is what you feel when you are in love and when the sunset is seen through the trees, and that darkness is felt within arguments and fights. Mulisch writes, “Hate is the darkness, that’s no good. And yet we’ve got to hate the Fascists, and that’s considered to be perfectly alright. How is that possible? It’s because we hate them in the name of light...” He conveys the idea that although hate is a bad, it is acceptable to hate when the hate is for a good reason.