The Painted Pot Calling the Kettle Black

In The Assault darkness and light are compared to love and hate to show the nature of humans to react negatively to hate, therefore creating and ironically to create more of the same thing they are against.  The passage on page 38 “In the poem I wanted (. . .) so we become a bit unlike ourselves” shows the hate present throughout the war.  The repetition of the light versus the darkness, as compared to love and hate, demonstrates the evil of the war by bringing something so evil and dark into the light and having it be associated with the light.  The light that hate is associated with is the same light that is placed with love and the beauty of love.  The juxtaposition, especially with the justification of hate in the dialogue “we hate them in the name of the light” where earlier in the passage the light described is “the kind of light you sometimes see clinging to trees right after a sunset”, creates a tension to show that the hate is justified but it is no better than the hate that is “only in the name of darkness.”  This shows that as humans we are all equal but can justify our wrong doings, but, while justifying what we do if others do the same we look down upon them.  The constant tension shows the negative power of hate.

The negative nature is reinforced by the change in the people who have begun to hate, even though it is in the name of the light.  The people who have learned to hate the world that has always hated them believe their hate is better but it is obviously not because it has fundamentally changed who they are, morphing them into the enemy.  The characters even admit that “We’ve got to become a little bit like them in order to fight them- so we become a little bit unlike ourselves” and the admittance of the change displays the negative nature in losing self.  The loss of self is a negative and the juxtaposition Mulisch uses along with the repetition comments on the fickleness of humanity and their need to justify each thing done even if it is obviously an evil contorting their reality.  The techniques used by Mulisch shows the nature of humans to justify their own actions, no matter how dark.