In recognition of the death of Elie Wiesel, let's discuss the historicity of his books.
I read Night in grade school and later came across some accusations that his accounts were partially fictionalized, but I didn't care enough to follow up and more readily dismissed it as /pol/shit. Where do his books stand among historical holocaust works?
>I read Night in grade school and later came across some accusations that his accounts were partially fictionalized
Here's the thing: all memoirs contain elements that are partially fictionalized. This is true across all time periods, all genres, all events. It's not limited to Night, it's not limited to WWII memoirs, it's universal.
The primary reasons for fictional elements in memoirs are:
-For narrative/structural purposes. For example, someone might combine locations or people into one person in order to make it easier for the reader to understand, or eliminate certain parts of the story that might 'bog down' the memoir unnecessarily.
-For personal reasons related to the content of the memoir. For example, someone might not want to admit that they did something or witnessed something that might make them unappealing to the reader or would cause controversy.
-Due to lack of memory and the need for detail. For example, someone will not likely be able to remember exact conversations spanning weeks/months/years of their life, so they may invent them or cobble them together from various conversations to create one cohesive conversation for a part in the memoir.
-For biased reasons. For example, someone may want to encourage a certain point of view by portraying people or events in a certain way. This is more common with revolutions and political upheavals. (see: Royalist memoirs about the French Revolution.)
So, yes, Night contains fictional elements. All memoirs do. It's difficult to gauge just how fictional Night is because Wiesel never specifically told people what happened to him and what may have been fictionalized for whatever reasons. Based on the interviews and speeches he's given that correspond with most of the events in the book, I would personally classify it as a regular memoir. As opposed to a story fictional memoir like This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.
>>1363472
Man, this sounds naive, but I've often wondered how anyone managed a memoir/autobigoraphy when many I've read had such extreme detail and depth when my own memories seemed to lack the organization of those within a great autobiography.
I thought perhaps I just had comparatively poor memory and when writing about distant personal events, I'd use some of the same techniques you've listed as a crutch, but seeing that it's more common than I imagined is reassuring.
>>1363472
You failed to mention insanity. Several memoirs contain claims that can only be explained away as hallucinations, hysteria or various disorders. Or deliberate lies, I suppose.
>>1366218
I wouldn't include insanity as a primary reason but looking back I would add and include insanity under:
-Due to personal perception and recollection. Someone may remember people or events differently due to various personal, mental or even medical reasons, such as the general poor nature of memory, mass hysteria, planted/false/skewed memories, media coverage, writing about it a lengthy time after the fact, their mental state while the event was happening, and other types of distortion and so on.
It doesn't even have to be a long time after the event for hysteria and planted memories to occur. When the survivors of the Titanic were on the Carpathia, they all began sharing their stories and certain claims (totally false or otherwise) started getting passed around until other people were claiming them as their own memories.
>>1366194
Think about it this way: Imagine an event from your childhood. You likely have some vague memories of this event, right? But you wouldn't be able to remember every single thing exactly the way it really happened, for many reasons.
So if you were to write about the event in a memoir, you'd have to flesh it out for it to be interesting to a reader or have more meaning. Let's say you're writing about the first time you rode without training wheels. You might write that you were wearing your favorite pair of worn down, light-up sneakers (even if you don't remember if you were, it just seems likely) or you might insert a conversation you with your dad about how riding without training wheels means you're growing up right after the event (even if it happened at a different time) to make the memory more poignant and structurally understandable.
