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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
The Tower of Babel
The Torah tells the story of a time when the world’s inhabitants spoke a universal language. Men decide to build a city with a tower that rises to the heavens, dominating the land, giving them security and safety. God sees what they built, and he understands that their purpose is to be a law unto themselves, independent of spiritual oversight. God intervenes so that each person suddenly speaks in a language unknown to any of the others. The people stop building the city as they are unable to cooperate anymore. The place is named Babel.
Primo Levi sees parallels in the story of the Tower of Babel with the Nazi nationalistic hubris that seeks to build the pure and powerful Aryan nation, their contempt for God and man obvious. The result of their machinations to rid Germany of diversity is the Auschwitz camp. Like the city of Babel, the camp’s many languages confound the prison populace. Levi particularly calls out the building of the Buna rubber plant’s Carbide Tower by the prisoners for its biblical metaphor, explaining, “Its bricks were called Ziegel, briques, tegula, cegli, kamenny, mattoni, téglak, and they were cemented by hate[.]” All the different languages have a different word for “bricks,” symbolizing the swirling disarray and confusion in the camp.
Time
Days, weeks, months, and for some prisoners, years drag on without rescue by the international community. For the prisoners at Auschwitz, time seems to stand still. The past is where their homes, loved ones, and former lives are and where they cannot return. The future is unknowable and so full of peril they can’t think about it. The pressure to survive hunger and cold focuses all their attention on daily needs and strategies. They think only as far as the next soup ration. The temperate seasons of spring and summer flying by, chased by the bitter cold of fall and winter, mark a seemingly endless cycle with no reprieve.
The Drowned
Drowning as used by Primo Levi references sinking to the bottom of a watery grave and suffocating. The evocative visual of waters closing over one’s head gives a nightmarish quality to the metaphor. Chapter 2, “On the Bottom,” describes the plummet into the abyss after having all the trappings of self taken away. The resilience of identity normally keeps one’s head above water, allowing the navigation of mysterious waters in relative ease. Without that buoyancy, a person must constantly be swimming to the surface lest they sink and perish. The metaphor plays out in the camp in the choice to actively struggle to survive. Those who do not swim will sink. Levi tells Jean the story of Ulysses, who set out on the open sea to venture to uncharted places. Ulysses’s fate was determined by outside forces. Lines of Ulysses’s story found in chapter 11, “The Canto of Ulysses” demonstrate such an idea: “[A]nd the prow went down, as pleased Another . . . And over our heads, the hollow seas closed up.” That the ship sank under the guidance of providence presents another paradigm that Levi must consider, that God plays a role in survival.
