Previous
Parenting Across Time
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Night, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
“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
Compare and contrast themes from other texts to this theme…
The Psychological Effects of Illness ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of The Psychological Effects of Illness appears in each chapter of Night. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
How often theme appears:
chapter length:
Chapter
Night
Get the entire Night LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
The Psychological Effects of Illness Quotes in Night
Below you will find the important quotes in Night related to the theme of The Psychological Effects of Illness.
Night Quotes
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.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
This is the first line of the story. Just in the first sentence, Munro introduces urgency into the story by invoking both medical and weather emergencies. The narrator, who is an adult woman looking back on a particular time in her childhood, connects the unpredictability and inevitability of the snowstorm with that of illness. Humans are relatively powerless to prevent the sometimes catastrophic effects of issues such as snowstorms and illness. This feeling of powerlessness in the face of the unpredictable aspects of life is essential to understand the narrator’s existential journey in the story. After her appendectomy, the narrator’s Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde
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.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
After the narrator has her appendix removed, she recovers and returns to school. During the Easter holidays, the narrator’s mother reveals that the doctor, while doing the appendectomy, had also removed a mysterious lump. The adult narrator in this quote reflects on the vast differences in society between the time in which she grew up and that in which she writes. In the case of the lump, attitudes about the possibility of cancer is a huge difference between these two time periods. It betrays both a lack of advancement in the medical field in the 1940s (and thus a higher Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a
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.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
The narrator begins to experience dark thoughts at night in her shared room with Catherine. She cannot control these thoughts. As is clear from the quote, her violent thoughts have no logic, reason, or motivation. Because the narrator is unable to control the dark thoughts inside herself, these thoughts force her to reckon with her own dark side. The pattern of these thoughts only showing up when the narrator is the lone person awake in her house demonstrates the impact of isolation on the narrator’s psyche. This isolation also puts the narrator in the position of dealing with these thoughts Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperio
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.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
After the narrator confesses her dark thoughts about killing her sister to her father, he replies nonchalantly. In telling her that unwanted dark thoughts are at least somewhat normal or common, the narrator’s father confirms that the narrator is simply growing up. In other words, the narrator joins the adults in her life in dealing with complicated and dark parts of the self. His comparison of the narrator’s dark thoughts to a dream highlights the disconnect between the narrator’s unconscious and reality. Furthermore, his statement that the thoughts are an effect of the ether (anesthetic) that the hospital gave the Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore.
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).
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
After the narrator’s father comforts her about her dark thoughts, the adult narrator reflects on his parenting style in this moment. Similarly to the narrator’s reflections on discussions around illness when she was a child, the narrator identifies sharp contrasts between the conversation around mental health in the present and the conversation around mental health in her childhood. The narrator’s comment that, in her father’s position, she might have sent her child to a psychiatrist highlights the discussion of parenting in the story. However, when the narrator says that she would have done this a generation and an income further, Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectet
