As with many of his novels, Wiesel draws upon autobiographical information in his characterization of the protagonist.

Like Wiesel, the novel's protagonist is a Holocaust survivor named Eliezer who works as a reporter and who suffers a horrendous and nearly fatal accident when run over by a cab driver in New York. Dr. Paul Russel is clearly modeled after Dr. Paul Braunstein, the doctor who saved Wiesel's life after he was run over by a taxi cab and to whom the novelist dedicates this book. Furthermore, the protagonist, like the novelist, has a mother named Sarah.

As with many of his books, Wiesel's narrative in The Accident continuously weaves back and forth between the past and the present, guided thematically in a loose order. Wiesel employs a stream of consciousness: Events in the narrator's present experience remind him of past events, causing his mind—and that of...