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''The Assault'' (original title in Dutch: ''De Aanslag'') is a 1982 novel by Dutch author Harry Mulisch. Random House published an English translation by Claire Nicholas White in 1985. It tells the story of the lone survivor of a night in Haarlem during World War II when the Nazi occupation forces, finding a Dutch collaborator murdered, retaliate by killing the family in front of whose home the body was found. ==Plot== The novel consists of a brief prologue and five "episodes" dated 1945, 1952, 1956, 1966, and 1981. Anton Steenwijk struggles to accept his traumatic experience from the past. In the beginning he suppresses all his memories of them, and that night. However just as he begins to forget, fate steps in, and challenges him to unearth what really happened all those years ago. Slowly, as he pieces together what happened that night, he begins to face and accept his past as a part of him. The theme of the novel is the development of the past into the present, and heading into the yet to be determined future as is shown in the prologue by a man walking backwards to push a boat forwards. Recurring themes and symbols include a symbol representing Anton piecing his life back together, rocks depict hatred and unhappiness, and a recurrent theme of darkness and light. Another is the motif of chance, which is used throughout the novel beginning with the dice in Anton's pocket and finally ending when Anton learns the true cause of the fate of his family. Anton's obsession with completion and consistency is why he has such a difficult time grasping the events of his childhood. What Anton initially saw as acts of chance slowly evolved over the course of the novel to become cause and effect relationships, leaving nothing to chance and Anton satisfied. A subcutaneous underlining of the plot is random truths and irony of "what are the chances that...", an example being that Anton later meets at a funeral of his father in law's friend, the man who murdered Fake Ploeg. Fake Ploeg's murder led to the arrest and execution of Anton's parents, the death of his brother and the torching of his childhood home. The novel ends with the discovery of truth, that Anton's family died instead of the family of refugees that lived hidden in the neighbour's house and of whom nobody knew. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Assault」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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