Anthology Part 2 - Night

Prose situation and arc

Read the complete anthology extract below. Follow the movement between the remembered summer and the adult narrator's later reflections.

Night

By Alice Munro

[1] When I was young, there seemed to be never a childbirth, or a burst appendix, or any
[2] other drastic physical event that did not occur simultaneously with a snowstorm. The
[3] roads would be closed, there was no question of digging out a car anyway, and some
[4] horses had to be hitched up to make their way into town to the hospital. It was just
[5] lucky that there were horses still around – in the normal course of events they would
[6] have been given up, but the war and gas rationing had changed all that, at least for the
[7] time being.

[8] When the pain in my side struck, therefore, it had to do so at about eleven o'clock at
[9] night, and a blizzard had to be blowing, and since we were not stabling any horses at the
[10] moment, the neighbors’¹ team had to be brought into action to take me to the hospital.
[11] A trip of no more than a mile and a half but an adventure all the same. The doctor was
[12] waiting, and to nobody’s surprise he prepared to take out my appendix. …

[13] So I lay, minus my appendix, for some days looking out a hospital window at the snow
[14] sifting in a somber way through some evergreens. I don’t suppose it ever crossed my
[15] head to wonder how my father was going to pay for this distinction. (I think he sold a
[16] woodlot that he had kept when he disposed of his father’s farm. He would have hoped to
[17] use it for trapping or sugaring. Or perhaps he felt an unmentionable nostalgia.)

[18] Then I went back to school, and enjoyed being excused from physical training for longer
[19] than necessary, and one Saturday morning when my mother and I were alone in the
[20] kitchen she told me that my appendix had been taken out in the hospital, just as I
[21] thought, but it was not the only thing removed. The doctor had seen fit to take it out
[22] while he was at it, but the main thing that concerned him was a growth. A growth, my
[23] mother said, the size of a turkey’s egg.

[24] But don’t worry, she said, it’s all over now.

[25] The thought of cancer never entered my head and she never mentioned it. I don’t think
[26] there could be such a revelation today without some kind of question, some probing
[27] about whether it was or it wasn’t. Cancerous or benign – we would want to
[28] know at once. The only way I can explain our failure to speak of it was that there must
[29] have been a cloud around that word…

[30] So I did not ask and wasn’t told and can only suppose it was benign or was most
[31] skillfully got rid of, for here I am today. And so little do I think of it that all through my
[32] life when called upon to list my surgeries, I automatically say or write only “Appendix”. …

[33] In the heat of early June I got out of school, having made good enough marks to free me
[34] from the final examinations. I looked well, I did chores around the house, I read books
[35] as usual, nobody knew there was a thing the matter with me.

[36] Now I have to describe the sleeping arrangements in the bedroom occupied by my sister
[37] and myself. It was a small room that could not accommodate two single beds side by
[38] side, so the solution was a pair of bunk beds, with a ladder in place to help whoever
[39] slept in the top bunk climb into bed. That was me. When I had been younger and prone
[40] to teasing, I would lift up the corner of my thin mattress and threaten to spit on my little
[41] sister lying helpless in the bunk below. Of course my sister – her name was Catherine –
[42] was not really helpless. She could hide under her covers, but my game was to watch
[43] until suffocation or curiosity drove her out, and at that moment to spit or successfully
[44] pretend to spit on her bared face, enraging her.
[45] I was too old for such fooling, certainly too old by this time. My sister was nine when I
[46] was fourteen. The relationship between us was always unsettled. When I wasn’t
[47] tormenting her, teasing her in some asinine way, I would take on the role of
[48] sophisticated counsellor or hair-raising storyteller…

[49] I don’t mean to say that I was entirely in control of her, or even that our lives were
[50] constantly intertwined. She had her own friends, her own games. …

[51] In the month June, as I have said, I was free of school and left on my own, as I don’t
[52] remember being in quite the same way in any other time of my growing-up. I did some
[53] chores in the house, but my mother must have been well enough, as yet, to handle most
[54] of that work. Or perhaps we had just enough money at the time to hire what she – my
[55] mother – would call a maid, though everyone else said hired girl. I don’t remember, at
[56] any rate, having to tackle any of the jobs that piled up for me in later summers, when I
[57] fought quite willingly to maintain the decency of our house. It seems that the mysterious
[58] turkey egg must have given me some invalid status, so that I could spend part of the
[59] time wandering about like a visitor.

[60] Though not trailing any special clouds. Nobody in our family would have got away with
[61] that. It was all inward – this uselessness and strangeness I felt. …

[62] It must have been just that every moment of the day was not filled up with jobs, as it
[63] was in summers before and after.

[64] So maybe that was the reason that I had begun to have trouble getting to sleep. At first,
[65] I think, that meant lying wide awake maybe till around midnight and wondering at how
[66] wide awake I was, with the rest of the household asleep. I would have read, and got
[67] tired in the usual way, and turned out my light and waited. Nobody would have called
[68] out to me earlier, telling me to put out my light and get to sleep. For the first time ever
[69] (and this too must have marked a special status) I was left to make up my own mind
[70] about such a thing.

[71] It took a while for the house to change from the light of day and from the household
[72] lights turned on late into the evening. Leaving behind the general clatter of things to be
[73] done, hung up, finished with, it became a stranger place in which people and the work
[74] that dictated their lives fell away, their uses for everything around them fell away, all the
[75] furniture retreated into itself and no longer existed because of nobody’s attention.

[76] You might think this was a liberation. At first, perhaps it was. The freedom. The
[77] strangeness. But as my failure to fall asleep prolonged itself, and as it finally took hold
[78] all together until it changed into the dawn, I became more and more disturbed
[79] by it. I started saying rhymes, then real poetry, first to make myself go under
[80] but then hardly of my own volition. The activity seemed to mock me. I was
[81] mocking myself, as the words turned into absurdity, into the silliest random
[82] speech.

[83] I was not myself.

[84] I had been hearing that said of people now and then, all my life, without thinking what it
[85] could mean.

[86] So who do you think you are, then?

[87] I had been hearing that too, without attaching to it any real menace, just taking it as a
[88] sort of routine jeering.

[89] Think again.
[90] By this time it wasn’t sleep I was after. I knew mere sleep wasn’t likely. Maybe not even
[91] desirable. Something was taking hold of me and it was my business, my hope, to fight it
[92] off. I had the sense to do that, but only barely, as it seemed. Whatever it was was trying
[93] to tell me to do things, not exactly for any reason but just to see if such acts were
[94] possible. It was informing me that motives were not necessary.

[95] It was only necessary to give in. How strange. Not out of revenge, or for any normal
[96] reason, but just because you had thought of something.

[97] And I did think of it. The more I chased the thought away, the more it came back. No
[98] vengeance, no hatred – as I’ve said, no reason, except something like an utterly cold
[99] deep thought that was hardly an urging, more of a contemplation, could take possession
[100] of me. I must not even think of it but I did think of it.

[101] The thought was there and hanging in my mind.

[102] The thought that I could strangle my little sister, who was asleep in the bunk below me
[103] and whom I loved more than anybody in the world.

[104] I might do it not for jealousy, viciousness, or anger, but because of madness, which
[105] could be lying right beside me there in the night. Not a savage madness either, but
[106] something that could be almost teasing. A lazy, teasing, half-sluggish suggestion that
[107] seemed to have been waiting a long time.

[108] It might be saying why not. Why not try the worst?

[109] The worst. Here in the most familiar place, the room where we had lain for all our lives
[110] and thought ourselves most safe. I might do it for no reason I or anybody could
[111] understand, except that I could not help it.

[112] The thing to do was to get up, to get myself out of that room and out of the house. I
[113] went down the rungs of the ladder and never cast a single look at my sister where she
[114] slept. Then quietly down the stairs, nobody stirring, into the kitchen where everything
[115] was so familiar to me that I could make my way without a light. The kitchen door was
[116] not really locked – I am not even sure that we possessed a key. A chair was pushed
[117] under the doorknob so that anybody trying to get in would make a great clatter. A slow
[118] careful removal of the chair could be managed without making any noise at all.

[119] After the first night I was able to make my moves without a break, so that I could be
[120] outside, as it seemed, within a couple of smooth seconds.

[121] Of course there were no streetlights – we were too far from town.

[122] Everything was larger. The trees around the house were always called by their names –
[123] the beech tree, the elm tree, the oak tree, the maples always spoken of in the plural and
[124] not differentiated, because they clung together. Now they were all intensely black. So
[125] were the white lilac tree (no longer with its blooms) and the purple lilac tree – always
[126] called lilac trees not bushes because they had grown too big.

[127] The front and back and side lawns were easy to negotiate because I had mown them
[128] myself with the idea of giving us some townlike respectability. …

[129] Back and forth I walked, first close to the house and then venturing here and there as I
[130] got to rely on my eyesight and could count on not bumping into the pump handle or the
[131] platform that supported the clothesline. The birds began to stir, and then to sing − as if
[132] each of them had thought of it separately, up there in the trees. They woke far earlier
[133] than I would have thought possible. But soon after those earliest starting songs, there got
[134] to be a little whitening in the sky. And suddenly I would be overwhelmed with sleepiness. I
[135] went back into the house, where there was suddenly darkness everywhere, and I very
[136] properly, carefully, silently, set the tilted chair under the doorknob, and went upstairs
[137] without a sound, managing doors and steps with the caution necessary, although I
[138] seemed already half asleep. I fell into my pillow, and I woke late – late in our house being
[139] around eight o’clock.
[140] I would remember everything then, but it was so absurd – the bad part of it indeed was
[141] so absurd – that I could get rid of it fairly easily. My brother and sister had gone off to
[142] their classes in the public school, but their dishes were still on the table, a few bits of
[143] puffed rice floating in the excess milk.

[144] Absurd.

[145] When my sister got home from school we would swing in the hammock, one of us at
[146] either end.

[147] It was in that hammock that I spent much of the days, which possibly accounted for my
[148] not getting to sleep at night. And since I did not speak of my night difficulties, nobody
[149] came up with the simple information that I’d be better off getting more action during the
[150] day.

[151] My troubles returned with the night, of course. The demons got hold of me again. I knew
[152] enough soon to get up and out of my bunk without pretending that things would get
[153] better and that I would in fact go to sleep if I just tried hard enough. I made my way as
[154] carefully out of the house as I had done before. I became able to find my way around
[155] more easily; even the inside of the rooms became more visible to me and yet more
[156] strange. …

[157] The east wall of the kitchen had no windows in it but it had a door opening on a stoop
[158] where we stood to hang out the heavy wet washing, and haul it in when it was dry and
[159] smelling all fresh and congratulatory, from white sheets to dark heavy overalls.

[160] At that stoop I sometimes halted in my night walks. I never sat down but it eased me to
[161] look towards town, maybe just to inhale the sanity of it. All the people getting up before
[162] long, having their shops to go to, their doors to unlock and milk bottles to take inside,
[163] their busyness.

[164] One night – I can’t say whether it could be the twentieth or the twelfth or only the eighth
[165] or the ninth that I had got up and walked – I got a sense, too late for me to change my
[166] pace, that there was somebody around the corner. There was somebody waiting there
[167] and I could do nothing but walk right on. I would be caught if I turned back, and it would
[168] be worse that way than to be confronted.

[169] Who was it? Nobody but my father. He too was sitting on the stoop looking towards town
[170] and that improbable faint light. He was dressed in his day clothes – dark work pants, the
[171] next thing to overalls but not quite, and dark, rough shirt and boots. He was smoking a
[172] cigarette. One he rolled himself, of course. Maybe the cigarette smoke had alerted me to
[173] another presence, though it’s possible that in those days the smell of tobacco smoke was
[174] everywhere, inside buildings and out, so there was no way to notice it.

[175] He said good morning, in what might have seemed a natural way except that there was
[176] nothing natural about it. We weren’t accustomed to giving such greetings in our family.
[177] There was nothing hostile about this – it was just thought unnecessary, I suppose, when
[178] we would see each other off and on all day.

[179] I said good morning back. And it must have really been getting towards morning or my
[180] father would not have been dressed for a day's work in that way. The sky may have
[181] been whitening but hidden still between the heavy trees. The birds singing, too. I had
[182] taken to staying away from my bunk till later and later, even though I didn’t get comfort
[183] from doing so as I had at first. The possibilities that had once inhabited only the
[184] bedroom, the bunk beds, were taking up the corners everywhere.

[185] Now that I come to think of it, why wasn't my father in his overalls? He was dressed as if
[186] he had to go into town for something, first thing in the morning.

[187] I could not continue walking, the whole rhythm of it had been broken.

[188] “Having trouble sleeping?” he said.
[189] My impulse was to say no, but then I thought of the difficulties of explaining that I was
[190] just walking around, so I said yes.

[191] He said that was often the case on summer nights.

[192] “You go to bed tired out and then just as you think you’re falling asleep you’re wide
[193] awake. Isn’t that the way?”

[194] I said yes.

[195] I knew now that he had not heard me getting up and walking around on just this one
[196] night. The person whose livestock was on the premises, whose earnings such as they
[197] were lay all close by, and who kept a handgun in his desk drawer, was certainly going to
[198] stir at the slightest creeping on the stairs and the easiest turning of the knob.

[199] I am not sure what conversation he meant to follow then, as regards to my being awake.
[200] He seems to have declared wakefulness to be a nuisance, but was that to be all? I
[201] certainly did not intend to tell him more. If he had given the slightest intimation that he
[202] knew there was more, if he’d even hinted that he had come here intending to hear it, I
[203] don’t think he’d have got anything out of me at all. I had to break the silence out of my
[204] own will, saying that I could not sleep. I had to get out of bed and walk.

[205] Why was that?

[206] I did not know.

[207] Not bad dreams?

[208] No.

[209] “Stupid question,” he said. “You wouldn’t get chased out of your bed on account of good
[210] dreams.”

[211] He let me wait to go on, he didn’t ask anything. I meant to back off but I kept talking.
[212] The truth was told with only the slightest modification.

[213] When I spoke of my little sister I said that I was afraid I would hurt her. I believed that
[214] would be enough, that he would know enough of what I meant.

[215] “Strangle her,” I said then. I could not stop myself, after all.

[216] Now I could not unsay it, I could not go back to the person I had been before.

[217] My father had heard it. He had heard that I thought myself capable of, for no reason,
[218] strangling little Catherine in her sleep.

[219] He said, “Well.”

[220] Then he said not to worry. He said, “People have those kinds of thoughts sometimes.”

[221] He said this quite seriously and without any sort of alarm or jumpy surprise. People have
[222] these kinds of thoughts or fears if you like, but there’s no real worry about it, no more
[223] than a dream, you could say.

[224] He did not say, specifically, that I was in no danger of doing such a thing. He seemed
[225] more to be taking it for granted that such a thing could not happen. An effect of the
[226] ether, he said. Ether they gave you in the hospital. No more sense than a dream. It
[227] could not happen, in the way that a meteor could not hit our house (of course it could,
[228] but the likelihood of its doing so put it in the category of couldn't).

[229] He did not blame me, though, for thinking of it. Did not wonder at me, was what he said.

[230] There were other things he could have said. He could have questioned me further about
[231] my attitude to my little sister or my dissatisfactions with my life in general. If this were
[232] happening today, he might have made an appointment for me to see a psychiatrist. (I
[233] think that is what I might have done for a child, a generation and an income further on.)
[234] The fact is, what he did worked as well. It set me down, but without either mockery or
[235] alarm, in the world we were living in.

[236] People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.

[237] If you live long enough as a parent nowadays, you discover that you have made
[238] mistakes you didn’t bother to know about along with the ones you do know about all too
[239] well. You are somewhat humbled at heart, sometimes disgusted with yourself. I don’t
[240] think my father felt anything like this. I do know that if I had ever taxed him, with his
[241] use on me of the razor strap or his belt, he might have said something about liking or
[242] lumping it. Those strappings, then, would have stayed in his mind, if they stayed at all,
[243] as no more than the necessary and adequate curbing of a mouthy child’s imagining that
[244] she should rule the roost.

[245] “You thought you were too smart,” was what he might have given as his reason for the
[246] punishments, and indeed you heard that often in those times, with the smartness
[247] figuring as an obnoxious imp that had to have the sass beaten out of him. Otherwise
[248] there was the risk of him growing up thinking he was smart. Or her, as the case might
[249] be.

[250] However, on that breaking morning he gave me just what I needed to hear and what I
[251] was even to forget about soon enough.

[252] I have thought that he was maybe in his better work clothes because he had a morning
[253] appointment to go to the bank, to learn, not to his surprise, that there was no extension
[254] to his loan. He had worked as hard as he could but the market was not going to turn
[255] around and he had to find a new way of supporting us and paying off what we owed at
[256] the same time. Or he may have found out that there was a name for my mother’s
[257] shakiness and that it was not going to stop. Or that he was in love with an impossible
[258] woman.

[259] Never mind. From then on I could sleep.

---

Notes

• 1 neighbors: American spelling of neighbours

Vocabulary for reading

• A woodlot is an area of woodland; sugaring means collecting and processing tree sap for sugar.
• A stoop is a small platform or step outside a door.
• Ether was used as an anaesthetic; the father offers it as an explanation within the remembered conversation.

Night is prose, not poetry. Its useful terms are narrator, focalisation (whose
perception filters what we receive), paragraph, chronology, pacing, dialogue,
turning point and ending. Munro's first-person narrator looks back as an adult on a
summer when, aged about fourteen, she recovered from surgery, struggled to sleep, became
frightened by an unwanted violent thought about her beloved younger sister, and eventually
spoke to her father at dawn.

The thought frightens the narrator and conflicts with her love and actions; it is not presented as a wish, plan or deed. Keep that distinction clear when interpreting the passage.