This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen Critical Essay | Critical Review by Irving Howe

Critical Review by Irving Howe

SOURCE: “Writing and the Holocaust: How Literature Has (and Has Not) Met Its Greatest Challenge,” in New Republic, Vol. 195, No. 3745, October 27, 1986, pp. 27-39.

In the following essay on Holocaust literature, Howe comments on the narration in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Our subject resists the usual capacities of mind. We may read the Holocaust as the central event of this century; we may register the pain of its unhealed wounds; but finally we must acknowledge that it leaves us intellectually disarmed, staring helplessly at the reality or, if you prefer, the mystery of mass extermination. There is little likelihood of finding a rational structure of explanation for the Holocaust: it forms a sequence of events without historical or moral precedent. To think about ways in which the literary imagination might “use” the Holocaust is to entangle ourselves with a multitude of problems for...
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