Night Analysis

For this assignment I have chosen to use a passage in “Night” by Edna O’ Brien.  The passage, which starts on page three, begins with the sentence “One fine day,” and ends on page four with “Only the minutes are rugged.”  I found this passage to be particularly interesting because the author continuously uses a dark and dreary undertone.  She uses oxymoron to show how the reader is going to be immersed in a weird and different world throughout this novel.  She uses language such as “two dead men got up to fight, two blindmen looking on, two cripples running for a priest, and two dummies shouting, hurry on.”  She makes contradictions saying she “felt, seen, heard, not fully felt, most meagerly seen, scarcely heard at all.”  This shows how her world is not straight forward, but that it is “topsy-turvy,” and perhaps even chaotic and depressing. 

 

The whole passage seems to continue to have the bleak undertone that it started with.  She begins to point out milestones, or important events in a person’s life.  Tombstones are mentioned next, and phrases such as “lit with blood, two dead men, old membrane, and Count Dracula” emphasize the death she is referring to.  Whetstones, which are used to sharpen knives, also help to signify darkness and danger, but could also symbolize her cutting new pathways into her different world that others are not used to.  She then talks about mirrors and how they are used for “wondering at, and wondering into.”  She is using mirrors to show how she will reflect back on her experiences and thoughts throughout the novel, most of which break many taboos.  She shows how she is not the typical Irish lady, she enjoys sex and men and she is not afraid to use profane language, such as when she says “so fucking much.”    The phrase “Count Dracula swagger” represents sex, blood, religion, and darkness also.  While Count Dracula is now synonymous with darkness and evil, the original story portrays him as someone who desperately wants to be accepted and loved, the same things that O’ Brien wanted.  She possibly sees parts of herself in Count Dracula, being that she is different and somewhat misunderstood also.

Her mind continues to wander as she is lying in bed, and she cannot seem to bring herself to sleep.  Phrases like, “paws come out from underneath the well of the bed,” help keep the creepy undertone from the first paragraph.  Again the repetition of oxymoron is shown here with “some gloved, some ungloved.”  She is again reminiscing about her past experiences, and even those seem peculiar as she describes her better times as “halcyon days, rings, ringlets, ashes of roses, shit, chantilly, high teas, drop scones, serge suits, binding attachments, all that.”  She is not romanticizing her past experiences as she includes “shit” in with high teas, for they helped to make her the dark, realistic person that she is today.  She describes herself as somewhat heartless, saying that she feels “as much for the woman in the train who had the flushes as for the woman, Lil, who bore me.”  She cares no more for her mother than she does for a random woman.  She is an honest woman, and she does not want to glamorize the situation, or make it seem any different than it really is.  Honesty can sometimes be scary also, for many people do not want to see things for how they truly are.

The gloomy tone continues to the next part of the passage where she begins to describe the outside world.  She uses words to communicate the dreariness of what she sees such as “blustery,” and acknowledges that sometimes when the violent winds stop for a moment that she can hear “the cars, their drone in the distance, cars going too fast at night.”  The image of a car going to fast at night brings emotions such as fear and uneasiness.  Even the trees are “creaking and groaning,” rather than quietly swaying in the wind.  In her mind she is still trying to fall asleep and pass the time.  As she tries to count sheep the way that children do, she ends up seeing them “tumbling into one another,” and “ruddled at that.”  The gory vision of the sheep however, is better than the boring alternative of counting apples.  She acknowledges that time does pass, with Christmases coming quickly every year, again using melancholy phrases like “the guzzle beneath the parasitic mistletoe.”

Throughout the entire passage there is a continuous gloomy, scary tone.  The use of many oxymoron help to present to the reader how O’ Brien’s life is not going to seem uncomplicated.  Instead of being a plain and traditional lady, she is comfortable in situations that are uncomfortable, and she is forward and provocative as well.  Being that this is the first passage, it previews and sets the tone for the rest of the novel and in many ways describes the type of person that she is.