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Night
The distant town highlights the isolation of the narrator’s family and hints at the opportunity that beckons just beyond their small world. The difficulty that the narrator’s family experiences getting to the doctor during the snowstorm illustrates the extent of their isolation. Similarly, the narrator’s solitude during the summer as she spends her days on the hammock on the family’s property illustrates her lack of connection to her peers and community. The narrator writes that she had mown her family’s front and back lawns “with the idea of giving [the family] some townlike respectability.” The emphasis on “respectability” suggests that there is a class divide between her family’s lifestyle and that of town-dwellers. When the narrator runs into her father on one of her night walks, she notices that he is wearing nicer clothes and looking towards the “improbable faint light” of town. This scene hints at an aspirational significance of the town—it’s a place that’s almost within sight, yet it’s also far away, perhaps too far for the narrator and her family to reach.
Town Quotes in Night
The Night quotes below all refer to the symbol of Town. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Night
Quotes
The east side of our house and the west side looked on two different worlds, or so it seemed to me. The east side was the town side, even though you could not see any town. Not so much as two miles away, there were houses in rows, with streetlights and running water. And though I have said you could not see any of that, I am really not sure that you couldn’t get a certain glow if you stared long enough.
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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.
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Get the entire Night LitChart as a printable PDF.
Town Symbol Timeline in Night
The timeline below shows where the symbol Town appears in Night. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Night
...east side of her house and the west side. The east side, closer to the town, looks towards the faint light of civilization. The west, on the other hand, looks towards...
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...dark, they also seem stranger. She often sits on the stoop and looks towards the town, though it is miles away, to “inhale the sanity of it.”
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...on the stoop in his day clothes, though not his work clothes, and looks towards town. He says good morning, which is unusual, because her family sees each other so much...
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...usual, the narrator as an adult reflects that he probably had an important meeting in town, perhaps a meeting about a bank loan he wouldn’t get or about his wife’s “shakiness”...
(full context)
