Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Night Watchman, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power, Solidarity, and Community Action
Oppression and Supposed Good Intentions
Humor and Pain
Sex, Violence, and Gender
Agency and Exploitation
Summary
Analysis
This is the first time Zhaanat’s medicine hasn’t worked, Patrice thinks about her eyes. “White-man diseases need white-man cures,” Zhaanat says. She travels to a clinic, where a nurse gives her ointment to rub into her eyes, saying she might have gone blind if it had been left untreated for much longer. After Patrice talks about all of the things she would have missed if she had gone blind, Wood Mountain asks if she would have missed seeing him too. He says that Patrice is the only one for him, that he means it with his whole heart, and ends by asking her, for god’s sake, to marry him. After, Patrice feels relieved because she hadn’t promised anything, and Wood Mountain is relieved that she didn’t say no.
When Wood Mountain proposes to Patrice, she feels swept up in the emotion, but afterward, she is glad that she didn’t say yes or promise him anything, knowing that, for her, independence is more important than a relationship that might be expected and might “check all the boxes” but for some reason still doesn’t feel quite right.
Themes
In the moment, though, Patrice had wanted to say that she wanted him too. Patrice thinks of something that her mother told her, which she thinks is definitely true: you don’t really know a man until you tell him you don’t love him. That’s when his true viciousness, below the surface so he could charm you, might come out.
After being swept up in the emotion of Wood Mountain’s proposal, Patrice thinks of something else: that men might be charming when they want something from you, but you don’t really know who they are, and violence might be lurking under an apparently kind exterior, ready to be unleashed if you don’t do what they want you to.
Themes
