The story “Night” reflects on how parenting strategies or norms can change across time and reflect society as a whole. The narrator of the story is an adult reflecting on a period of time in her childhood. This perspective allows her to comment on the events of the story with more maturity and life experience. The beginning of the core issue of the story, the narrator’s inability to sleep, comes as a result of her parents’ decision to let her choose her own bedtime. Regardless of whether this was a good or bad decision, this choice sets up the importance of parenting as a factor in the story.
Later in the story, when the narrator confesses her thoughts about harming her sister to her father, he gives a nonchalant response without any sign of alarm. He tells her not to worry, and that “people have those kinds of thoughts sometimes.” The narrator reflects that “if this were happening today, he might have made an appointment for me to see a psychiatrist.” This comment reminds the reader that the events of the story take place in an era very different from that of its writing—one in which mental struggles were generally dealt with privately rather than referred to a professional. After the narrator relays her conversation with her father, she writes that “if you live long enough as a parent nowadays, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn’t bother to know about along with the ones you do know about all too well.” She writes that, in keeping with societal convention, her father never felt remorse about inflicting corporal punishment upon his children, but nevertheless admits that, in the long term, her father’s matter-of-fact attitude about her dark thoughts helped. Implicitly, then, some of her father’s outdated methods were harmful (the corporal punishment) while others were surprisingly effective (treating her dark thoughts as a common problem). Through her ambivalent attitude about her father’s parenting, Munro suggests that while parenting norms are always limited by social convention, a caring parent can also transcend those limits.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Parenting Across Time ThemeTracker
Parenting Across Time Quotes in Night
The thought of cancer never entered my head and she never mentioned it. I don’t think there could be such a revelation today without some kind of question, some probing about whether it was or wasn’t. Cancerous or benign—we would want to know at once.
I remembered what I had completely forgotten—that I used to have a sandbox there, placed where my mother could watch me out that north window. A great bunch of overgrown spirea was flowering in its place now and you could hardly see out at all.
Who was it? Nobody but my father. He too sitting on the stoop looking towards town and that improbable faint light. He was dressed in his day clothes.
He said, “People have those kinds of thoughts sometimes.”
He said this quite seriously and without any sort of alarm or jumpy surprise. People have these kinds of thoughts or fears if you like, but there’s no real worry about it, no more than a dream, you could say.
[….] An effect of the ether, he said. Ether they gave you in the hospital. No more sense than a dream.
If this were happening today, he might have made an appointment for me to see a psychiatrist (I think that is what I might have done for a child, a generation and an income further).
If you live long enough as a parent nowadays, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn’t bother to know about along with the ones you do know about all too well. You are somewhat humbled at heart, sometimes disgusted with yourself. I don’t think my father ever felt anything like this.
