“Night” demonstrates how illness can affect one’s psyche and alter one’s thinking about the world. The story begins with an invocation of illness, starting with the narrator’s line, “when I was young, there seemed to be never a childbirth, or a burst appendix, or any other drastic event that did not occur simultaneously with a snowstorm.” This quote links medical emergencies with other “storms” in life, highlighting the severity of both illness and the climate in the world of the narrator. The narrator’s own appendectomy serves as a reminder of the fragility of life, though the reminder surfaces in a shocking way. After her operation, the narrator begins to have involuntary thoughts about killing her sister Catherine, suggesting that the brush with mortality has brought a consciousness of death into her everyday life. The introduction of death into her life brings, in turn, a loss of innocence—she transitions from a carefree childhood to a discomfort with herself and her capacity for dark thoughts that she must learn to live with. Though the narrator’s father suggests that surgical ether caused the unwanted thoughts and this comforts her for the time being, the narrator’s illness forces her to confront her psyche and the darkness in the world in a deeper way than before. Through the narrator’s early encounters with illness and its subsequent psychological struggles, Munro suggests that illness can force people to wrestle with unsettling truths about themselves and their place in the world.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Psychological Effects of Illness ThemeTracker
The Psychological Effects of Illness Quotes in Night
When I was young, there seemed to be never a childbirth, or a burst appendix, or any other drastic physical event that did not occur simultaneously with a snowstorm.
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.
The more I chased the thought away, the more it came back. No vengeance, no hatred—as I’ve said, no reason, except that something like an utterly cold deep thought that was hardly an urging, more of a contemplation, could take possession of me. I must not even think of it but I did think of it.
The thought was there and hanging in my mind.
The thought that I could strangle my little sister, who was asleep in the bunk below me and whom I loved more than anybody in the world.
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).
