58 pages • 1 hour read
Tracy SierraNightwatching
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The House
Content Warning: Both the source material and this guide contain descriptions of traumatic experiences, emotional and physical abuse towards women, bullying of a person with a skin condition, and violent death.
As the mother and her children are buried by a blizzard, their historic home protects them from the brutal weather. Though it keeps the cold and snow out, the Corner breaches its walls, and the house transforms into a trap, imprisoning her inside with a monster. Instead of remaining a haven, the house becomes a source of fear and uncertainty, and the mother's sense of security is broken when external threats penetrate the boundaries of her home. This inversion emphasizes the idea of vulnerability, demonstrating that ostensibly safe spaces can be compromised, leaving the occupants exposed and helpless. With little time to ponder, the mother takes her children and rushes to their hiding place, a womb-like area in the interior of her home. Its power to make them disappear is reassuring, but as her children surround her in primitive dread, the hiding place itself becomes suffocating and intensifies her isolation. The mother's emotional environment is also mirrored by the old house's multilayered appearance and convoluted layout, for she wanders through the labyrinth of her memories even as she hides in the deepest recesses of the old house. At the same time, she is imprisoned in the hiding spot as she must confront hidden truths and suppressed emotions. The home's familiar sounds, which once comforted her, now herald its transition into a battleground as she listens to the Corner's movements and desperately tries to assess how close he is to finding them. The house therefore mirrors her psychological state, oscillating between a sanctuary and a prison.
The home also symbolizes the impact of trauma over time. The home is etched with pain, from the attic wall paintings to the backyard cemetery and the blood-stained kitchen floor. The house is marked by traumatic events from the mother’s life and from the generations who have lived there before, including enslaved persons. The presence of trauma is therefore inescapable, and the mother's inability to escape her home parallels her struggle to overcome the pervasive and inevitable force of grief in her life. However, while the house symbolizes physical and emotional entrapment, it also holds the potential for liberation. The mother’s journey is marked by her efforts to reclaim her sense of self and agency, and the house that once confined her ultimately becomes a place in which she asserts her independence, vanquishes the monster, and regains custody of her children. Though the home holds painful memories, the mother chooses to see the house once again as a place of refuge, and the house therefore becomes a metaphor for the dynamic changes that the mother undergoes throughout her life.
Time and Memory
From the very beginning, time becomes crucial as the mother has mere moments to decide how to respond to the home invasion. Locked inside the dark space, she finds that time expands and contracts around her as she marks the Corner’s movements throughout the house. As the family hides, their bodies remind them that time has passed because they need to drink and excrete, but otherwise, the mother loses all track of the clock and marks time only by the thump of her children’s heartbeats: a reminder that they are still alive. Moments drag on forever as the mother longs for the Corner to exit the house. “[…] time pulled around and over her like a wet sheet, dragging and catching on every creak, every groan of wood and brick, collecting awful anticipation and snagging on the illogical hope that he had left” (47). Yet when she decides to run for help, she needs more time and must calculate her moves based on the intruder’s position inside the home.
The mother also loses track of time and space as she runs through the woods and gradually succumbs to the physical pain of her injuries, along with the shock of hypothermia and trauma. Similarly, while she is in the hospital, the pain medications dull her sense of time as she drifts in and out of consciousness. Her sense of clock time becomes essential as she gives the sergeant her account of the events, and her certainty of when and how the events occurred symbolizes her sanity. Even so, she must rely on a memory blunted by trauma and fogged by a head injury. Therefore, the plot does not take a linear course but depicts time as cyclical and fragmented, representing the disjointed nature of traumatic memories. The narrative alternates between the past and the present, blurring the lines between them. This nonlinear form implies that the mother is locked in a loop of remembering and reliving her tragedies.
Memory is portrayed as a persistent and invasive force as the mother is frequently confronted by memories that resurface, triggered by her present circumstances. Her memories often connect directly to the present, such as her freeze response to the intruder reminding her of freezing and falling to the floor when her college boyfriend frightened her. Other memories are imbued with emotional weight as she remembers her father-in-law’s abuse, the trial of the man whose actions killed her mother, and the day that her husband tragically died. The mother's recollections of her life highlight how intricately interwoven the past and present can be, producing a sense of temporal dislocation. The text describes the weight of her memories “superimposing over one another like film stuck in a camera” (349).
Animals
The animal motif throughout the story symbolizes the shared instincts that drive human and animal behavior toward self-preservation. The mother’s encounters with animals also reflect her instinctual responses to danger. As the mother faces threats to her and her children’s safety, she is depicted as a cornered animal, emphasizing her vulnerability and the raw, instinctual nature of her fear. As the narrative states, “In her desperation, her impatience, she understood the impulse of mother prey animals to devour their children to protect them, feeling a horrible need to swallow them whole, to hold her children inside her again” (21). Faced with existential threats and personal trauma, the mother goes into survival mode and exhibits animalistic responses such as the freeze response, heightened senses, and hypervigilance. Animals and humans also share the capacity to grieve. When the sergeant tells the mother that she cannot be reunited with her children, her feral, savage response reveals her deep connection to her children, for she “wailed, mouth opened to an animal sound, a deep primordial reverberation” (296).
Animals also play a role in the mysterious elements of the story. Before her husband’s death, he installs a game camera to track the deer in the woods behind their home. The children joke that the woods are haunted, and the camera footage makes the deer look ghostly with their glowing eyes. After her husband’s death, the mother perceives that the deer are acting strangely, and the game camera later reveals that the deer are reacting to the Corner, who stalks the house from the woods.
The pervasive animal motif throughout the story also relates to the mother’s psychological journey. The home invasion reminds her of the time when a disfigured mountain lion followed her on a mountainous trail. The predatory Corner slinking through her house reminds her of the mountain lion, for he is hunting her and the children. Accordingly, the image of a mountain lion’s yellow eyes reappears to her at various points during her ordeal. The Corner’s invocation of animalistic fables like “The Three Little Pigs” and his repurposing of their playful repetition is also designed to reflect this motif as he turns familiar rhymes into a source of menace. While hiding in the blackness, the mother compares her family to the “Three Blind Mice” and thinks about quotes from the popular children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. By including mentions of these normally innocuous stories in a sinister context, the author heightens the novel’s sense of danger and the children’s vulnerability.
