“Horses of the Night” tracks the young narrator, Vanessa’s, growth from young child to young adult, and her gradual loss of innocence along the way. Vanessa’s loss of innocence is largely precipitated by her relationship with her cousin Chris. Chris first arrives in Manawaka when he is 15 and Vanessa is 6. She worries that she won’t be able to keep up with him due to their age difference and that he’ll belittle her for it. She soon realizes, however, that Chris is kind to her and, in fact, doesn’t seem to take their age difference into account at all. He regales her with his dreams and philosophies about life and doesn’t seem to notice, or care, that Vanessa can’t fully understand what he means. For a while, Vanessa desperately wishes to be older so that she can understand Chris’s big ideas and respond to them knowingly. At first, Chris chips away at Vanessa’s innocence by exposing her to his big ideas about life and the universe. Over time, however, as Vanessa grows, harsh realities such as her father’s and grandmother’s deaths chip away further at her childlike innocence. By the end of the story, Vanessa is in college, a place where Chris dreamed of being, while Chris is confined to a mental hospital where he’s left to live in his dreams perpetually. In the story’s final scene, Vanessa finds the miniature leather saddle that Chris made for her when she was six, and her thrusting it back into a box in the attic represents leaving both her childhood and Chris behind. The parallel stories of Vanessa’s development and Chris’s stagnation suggest that loss of innocence is what allows one to function in and contend with the realities of the adult world.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Loss of Innocence ThemeTracker
Loss of Innocence Quotes in Horses of the Night
This method proved to be one that Chris always used in any dealings with my grandfather. When the bludgeoning words came […] Chris never seemed, like myself, to be holding back with a terrible strained force for fear of letting go and speaking out […] He would not argue or defend himself […] He simply appeared to be absent, elsewhere.
He missed the horses, I thought with selfish satisfaction, more than he missed his family. I could visualize the pair, one sorrel and one black, swifting through all the meadows of summer.
And soon, because I desperately wanted to, and because everyday mercifully made me older, quite soon I would be able to reply with such a lightning burst of knowingness that would astound him, when he spoke of the space or was it some black sky that never ended anywhere beyond this earth. Then I would not be innerly belittled for being unable to figure out what he would best like to hear. At that good and imagined time, I would not any longer be limited. I would not any longer be young.
I need to say something really penetrating, something that would show him I knew the passionate truth of his conviction. “I bet –” I said, “I bet you’ll sell a thousand, Chris.” Two years ago, this statement would have seemed self-evident, unquestionable. Yet now, when I had spoken, I knew that I did not believe it.
No human word could be applied. The lake was not lonely or untamed. These words relate to people, and there was nothing of people here. There was no feeling about the place. It existed in some world in which man was not yet born. I looked at the grey reaches of it and felt threatened. It was like the view of God which I had held since my father’s death. Distant, indestructible, totally indifferent.
