Select Chapter Summaries of
Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table
produce his flints, all the while expecting to die at any time. It
is the hunger that drives him to steal the cerium in order to
make flame for others.
Whether Levi knows it or not, he is using the match
as
a
metaphor
for his little spark of hope that remains within.
By Scott Albright
The hunger for food, the hunger to survive, it is this that
Primo Levi compares events in his life as a prisoner keeps him working, keeps him alive. He speaks of the
during the holocaust to the periodic table of elements. Russian liberators and the freight cars that transported the
The following are summaries of a select few of these surviving prisoners, yet he does not speak of his own destiny
at this time. This chapter is sad because of the death and
elements.
misery, but also something to rejoice because of the tales of
survival and life.
Phosphorus:
At the beginning of this chapter
Sulfur:
Levi is looking for a new job, which he
This short and strange chapter has
finds and talks about throughout the
varying
degrees of meaning, but I
reading. He briefly discusses his
particularly
like the quote about the
experience as a Jew working in a new
smell
of
sulfur:
“The B 41 (sulfur) was
environment under the time of Starace.
already
weighed
out, in three cardboard
Most of the chapter involves Levi’s work
boxes:
he
put
it in cautiously and,
in finding a cure for diabetes. He also
despite
the
mask,
which may have
spends a lot of time discussing different
leaked
a
bit,
immediately
smelled the
relationships he has with the new
dirty,
sad
smell
that
emanated
from the
people at his job.
mixture,
and
thought
that
maybe
the
One new relationship is with a
priest
was
right
too,
when
he
said
that
woman named Giulia, who Levi takes a
in Hell there is a smell of sulfur: after all,
liking to. When Giulia asks Levi what he
even the dogs don’t like it, everyone
is thinking about after an ordeal
knows that.”
involving her lover he said,
In this chapter I made a connection
“phosphorous.” Levi didn’t want to hear
between the worker and the servant,
her good news. He blocked it out in his
that the worker was but a servant in
head, but later on reflects on the
hell, angrily pushing along through the
situation with a more positive outlook.
day just to start it all over again the
He wrote, “ . . . a veil, a breath, a throw
next.
of the dice deflected us onto two
divergent paths, which were not ours.” Here he is talking
Uranium:
about fate.
In this chapter Levi talks about a man named Bonino
who
sends
him a package claiming it is uranium. Levi soon
Gold:
finds
that
the
metal is actually cadmium but allows the man
Levi is taken captive by Nazi militiamen and held
to
tell
the
story
as if the metal were truly something special.
as a prison inside a camp of some kind. Levi describes
I
find
this
chapter to be interesting because it lacks
the life of captivi H[