Night Flashcards
1
Q
Difficult childhood
A
- Pathetic fallacy of “there seemed to be never a childbirth or a burst appendix of any other drastic physical event that did not occur simultaneously with a snowstorm”
- “had to” be rushed to hospital at 11 pm. A blizzard “had to be blowing” - repetition leads to sense of inevitability that this would always happen at the most difficult time.
2
Q
Her illness:
A
- “Special status” “invalid status” - implies privilege as a result of illness
- Relaxed about hospital stay: “Adventure” / “Minus my appendix” / “Distinction”
- “Enjoyed being excused from physical training”
Something more sinister! - Foreshadowing that all is not good: “I looked well” - appearance only. Mentally, not well.
- “But it was not the only thing removed” - wait until this delayed main clause to discover this, and then until the last clause of the paragraph to find out what it was: “A growth… the size of a Turkey’s egg” - visual image, easy for a child to imagine.
3
Q
Relationship with her sister
A
- “I would take on the role of sophisticated counsellor” - metaphor of acting, doesn’t seem true
- “I don’t mean to say I was entirely in control or even that our lives were constantly intertwined” - “entirely” and “constantly” (adverbs) implies that this was at least partially the case (line 49). Metaphor “intertwined”
- “She had her own friends” - implied sister had friends, but the narrator may not
- “Threaten to spit on her” . Even though the narrator claims that her sister was “the person I loved most in the world” she is not always kind.
4
Q
UNCERTAINTY
A
- “Must have been” “maybe” “I think” dismisses and forgets “would have” past tense conditional - doesn’t really know.
- Sibilance of “Uselessness and strangeness I felt”
5
Q
Portrayal of night
A
- Title. Symbolically and literally “night”. In the story she opens up to her own metaphorical darkness, and thinks she won’t be able to resist killing her own sister
- “Stranger place” - comparative
- “Falling away” passivity and lack of control at night
- “The furniture retreated into itself….” metaphor, idea things are unreal, doesn’t understand the reality - constantly seeming different.
- “It took awhile for the house to change” - as if things are changing around her
- “Without a light”, symbolically without a light as well as literally
- “Everything was larger” idea that everything is worse, comparative
- Colour imagery “White” “lilac” → “intensely black” familiar sounds frightening, house also sounds dangerous. “I can’t say whether it could be the twentieth or the twelfth or only the eighth or the ninth that I had got up and walked - I got a sense, too late for me to change my pace, that there was somebody around the corner.” Anaphora - lack of grasp on reality, but list becomes progressively more likely!
- “The sky may have been whitening but hidden still between the heavy trees. The birds singing, too. The sky may have been whitening but hidden still between the heavy trees. The birds singing, too.” - Uncertainty because of repetition of modal verb “may” + colour imagery. No possibility of it being fixed.
6
Q
Powerlessness
A
- “My failure to sleep prolonged itself” - reflexive pronoun: she has no control.
- “First to make myself go under by then hardly of my own volition” losing sense of reality
- “I was not myself” - separation from reality, feelings and control. Simple declarative.
- 91, “Something was taking hold of me and it was my business, my hope, to fight it” correction, matter of fact “business”: vs abstract “hope”. Mental struggles and battles. Asyndeton. Mystery of the “something” that has agency / is metaphorically “taking hold”
- 97, “The more i chase the thought away the more it came back” anaphora, paradox. Reflects confusion
- 98 “no vengeance, no hatred…..” anaphora, embedded clause (conversational) + metaphor of “cold deep thought” emotionally + symbolic. “could take possession of me” implication of supernatural evil and reflection of her lack of control. Parallel structure.
- “I must not even think of it, but I did think of it” → epistrophe. Impossible to resist. Tense - present then past. Memories of her attempts to resist seem present and real.
7
Q
Fear of potential actions
A
- “The thought was there and hanging in my mind” sense of anticipation.Definite article. Anaphora. Power of “the thought”
- “I could strangle my sister.” possibility (modal verb) violence, escalation of violence.
- “Little sister” “Asleep in the bunk” → vulnerability.
- I could get rid of it fairly easily” “so absurd” - in the daytime it seems ridiculous/ she can easily dismiss it
- Single sentence paragraph “Absurd” says it so often to reassure herself
8
Q
Personification of madness
A
- “Madness, which could be lying right beside me” personification of evil, teasing, not entirely unwelcome (
- “It might be saying why not. Why not try the worse” anadiplosis. “Might be” - modal. Her pojections
- “The demons got hold of me again” - metaphor. Intrusive thoughts as the enemy.
- “even the inside of the rooms became more visible to me and yet more strange” - paradox
- “I never sat down but it eased me to look towards town, maybe just to inhale the sanity of it.”- isolation driving her insane
9
Q
Relationship with father
A
- Metaphorically and literally cannot keep walking “the whole rhythm of it had been broken”
- “I certainly did not intend to tell him more. If he had given the slightest intimation that he knew there was more, if he’d even hinted that he had come here intending to hear it, I don’t think he’d have got anything out of me at all…..” → conditionals, attempting to judge it retrospectively. “Had to” obligation on her to start talking.
- “I meant to”
- “When I spoke of my little sister I said that I was afraid I would hurt her. I believed that would be enough, that he would know enough of what I meant. ‘Strangle her,’ I said then. I could not stop myself after all.”
- Violence of “strangle”
- last sentence shows she does not have power over her words. Irony
- “My father had heard it. He had heard that I thought myself capable of, for no reason,
strangling little Catherine in her sleep.” Embedded clause = ambiguous - applicable
to both. (Does she believe she would do it but wouldn’t, or does she believe that,
without a motive, she would do it anyway?)
- Comforting analogy “could not happen, in the way that a meteor could not hit our house (of course it could,but the likelihood of its doing so put it in the category of couldn’t).”
- “There were other things he could have said.” criticism, repetition of modals “could have” and “might have”
- “It set me down, but without either mockery or alarm, in the world we were living in.” - metaphor. Provides grounding / reality.
- “Those strappings, then, would have stayed in his mind, if they stayed at all, as no more than the necessary and adequate curbing of a mouthy child’s imagining that she should rule the roost.” → World was hard, conditional clause . her father helped her, but could be hard too.
- “However, on that breaking morning he gave me just what I needed to hear and what I was even to forget about soon enough.”
- metaphors “breaking morning” - dawn, new day and hope
- metaphor “gave” - gift. She is grateful.
- After the penultimate paragraph describes the darkness in her father’s life, the short sentence “Never mind” totally dismisses all of this suffering in the same way he dismisses her “darkness”. Similar to him.
- ‘From then I could sleep” sleep, mental peace etc. symbolism. End of unrest.
