Night Woman Analysis
Night Woman was truly an inspirational story to me; it showed the innocence of a child as well as the care and loving of a mother through hard work, sacrifice, and dedication.
When reading this story I got the feeling that although the mother was sleeping with all these men to make ends meet, she was also doing it to fill a void in her. Maybe it was the loving and belonging of a male figure in her life.
"For a brief second, I almost mistake him
for the ghost of his father, an older
lover who disappeared with the night's
shadows a long time ago." (pg. 88)
"Should my son wake up,
I have prepared my fabrication...
I will tell him that his father has come,
that an angel brought him back
from Heaven for a while." (pg. 88)
Although I truly feel this way based on these quotes I also know for a fact that she doesn't really like what she is doing to herself; she opens up her story by saying:
"I cringe from the heat of the night on my face.
I feel s bare as open flesh.
Tonight I am much older than the twenty-five years
that I had lived.
The night is the time I dread
most in my life. Yet if I am to live,
I must depend on it." (pg. 83)
She talks about how much she hates it and then closes the paragraph off by saying that she must depend on it in order to live to show that she needs to do it to take care of her family (son). Based on the bible, as a woman you are the one to take care of the house; cooking, cleaning, loving, etc. Danticat expresses this throughout various writings in Kirk? Krak!
Another thing that Edwidge Danticat does in this short story that I liked very much was the imagery that she placed in the story. It's almost like she painted a picture of son like a goddess or of the highest person known. This is how you know that the character is suppose to be focused on more therefore the innocence of a child. I'm only going to give one example of this:
"It doesn't take long before he is snoring softly.
I listen for the shy laughter of his most
pleasant dreams. Dreams of angels skipping
over his head and occasionally
resting their pink heels on
his nose." (pg. 87)
When reading this passage you can actually image how pure and innocent the son must look if the mother envisioned angels dancing around his face while he is sleeping. Sleeping is another aspect of the story that shows innocent due to the fact that when most people or sleep they are in an unconscious state and their true selves are revealed and capture as majority of the time innocent and pure.
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