50 pages • 1 hour read
The Truce
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Literary Devices
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition is a literary device that involves placing two or more elements side- by-side to highlight their contrasts or differences. This technique is used to create a striking contrast between the elements, which can enhance the meaning, emphasize a particular point, or provoke thought and analysis in the reader. In The Truce, Levi draws a series of contrasts between people, places, and languages to illustrates the chaos and complexity of his situation. The Russian soldiers are contrasted against the Nazi camp guards, for example, with the indifference and pleasantness of the former highlighting the cruelty and brutality of the latter. As they cross over numerous borders and then the frontier between the communist and capitalist post-war worlds, Levi is reminded of the myriad cultures and beliefs that have been thrown together by the violence of the war, emphasizing the sheer scale of the war that he has experienced on an immediate, personal level.
The juxtapositions between people can also highlight a common humanity. When they are traveling to Starye Dorogi, Levi and Cesare visit a small village because Cesare is desperate to buy a chicken. At first, the villagers fire a gun at the two Italians. Then, they realize that they have no mutually-intelligible language. The Italian survivors and the villages are contrasted, seemingly from very different worlds, yet Levi manages to cross the divide by drawing pictures on the ground and finding a way to communicate. The juxtaposition is resolved; though they remain very different people from very different places, they delight in being able to find this moment of common humanity. Such resolutions of seemingly contrasting peoples are littered throughout the book, allowing Levi to demonstrate the extent to which common humanity can be found even after an incredibly devastating war.
First Person Narration
The Truce is narrated from the first-person perspective of Primo Levi himself. The audience views the world from Levi’s subjective perspective, meaning that most knowledge is limited to his immediate understanding of the world. As World War II draws to an end, for example, Levi is unaware of what is happening in the world. The Germans leave; the Russians arrive. The first-person narration illustrates how the war is experienced on a personal level, with global, world-changing events being obscured from those in the camps because they have no access to such information. Even at the end of the book, after Levi has been freed from the camps for many months, events beyond his immediate vicinity are presented as novel and new. The dropping of the atomic bomb, for example, is an important moment in world history but this only becomes clear to Levi and the other survivors once they leave the Soviet Union.
While some world events (such as the atomic bomb) are hidden from the narration, the horrors of the camps and their lingering impact are all too clear. As such, the first-person narration helps to contextualize Levi’s trauma when he comes into contact with German and Austrian civilians. Levi feels a swell of pain and horror, wondering whether these people knew the truth about what was happening in the camps. While Levi never comes to a firm understanding of whether they knew, his first-person perspective illustrates why there may be some doubt as to whether all of the German people knew about the Holocaust. In this way, Levi’s narration takes on an extra empathetic dimension, in which his experiences help him to understand how other people might have experienced the war in their own personal way.
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