Free Essay

At Night

In: English and Literature

Submitted By Judy12
Words 758
Pages 4
”At Night” by Andre Dubus.
Essay

The only thing in life, you can be completely sure about, is that you have to die some day. It is certain knowledge, and it applies to all living creatures on Earth. Still it’s hard to understand and accept, especially when it is your close friends and family it concerns.

“At Night” is a short story there describes time-consciousness connected to death. How you are trying to accept and realize the fact that we all have to die, because it is the most natural thing in the world. And when you are conscious about you and your love ones morality, you will try to pre-pare yourself by planning what you will do in the situation, where death will take over, and you stand powerless behind.

The story has minimalist traits, which means, that there are a lot of empty places you have to fill in as a reader. The reader is an active part in the interpretation, and can be understood as the mean-ingful connecting link between the text and reader. It demands therefore an in-depth analysis if you want to understand the deeper significance.

The story is written in past tense and it has a third person narrator, which gives a distance effect. The main characters doesn’t have names, they are just called “she” and “he”, and that also creates a sort of distance between the reader and the characters, where the distance can express the fact that the wife is trying to plan the futures unpredictability.

The wife ”always knew she would be a widow” (quotation) which is rooted in the typical stereo-type, where the woman become very old, and for several years life alone, in that house where she have lived a whole life with her loved partner. The wife is picturing herself like one of those wid-ows with only their past left. The photographs are mentioned twice in the texts, which means, that they have an importance. They illustrate her and her husband’s common life, the children they created together. An interesting element is that the photographs are “on the mantel over the fire” (quotation), which can be a metaphor for her time-consciousness, where she is trying to avoid the sorrow of her husband’s death. The fire is a symbol of a life sustaining significance, where it pictures the connection between life and life flame. Her life has contained a balance between her life and her relation to him, and his disappearance will change her point of view and her attitude.

She builds her life up with control, where she attempts to manage her fear and anxiety, to create an “easier” world. She thinks, that if she is prepared for her husband death, will she be resolved with the situation, and her subsequent life will continue. The quotation “Then he will not be, and she will be alone in the house, with the telephone and the car and the children coming to see her” defines how she will go on with life, where she will fill his void in her presence with these values.

But when the time comes, where her husband dies, all her preparations and plans goes away. The narrative style intensifies, and the summer night let its pale light comes through the open window, where both her and her husband are in their dream world. The limits are flowing at night, between reality and fiction, and all her control comes to an end. The contrast between day and night symbolize her psyche, where day illustrates her controlled mind, and night stands for how she lets go of her control patterns, where she feels and breaths life. The quotation “Seeing her lying beside his flesh, touching his cheek, saying: Oh hon.” is a very intensive description, where you really feel her sorrow, and all her emotions there are expressed. Her live partner, her lover, her husband, dies right beside her, and she imagines his soul flying with the birds, there sing, while she lays with his dead body and cries.

She has experienced a lot of deaths in her life, and her time-consciousness has always been telling her, that one day it will be her husband. And to deal with that, she made plans and preparations. But at that night, where they slept, and she found him dead, all her feelings went out. She never imagined that his death would be so painful for her, now when she had always knew she would be a widow.

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