Night Watch: A Novel

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3, Chapters 11-19

Part 3, Chapter 20-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Eliza’s Nail

When Papa assaults the ridge with Bart, Eliza defends herself with a knife hidden in the chicken coop. However, after Bart’s death, Papa proceeds to assault Eliza as well, and she hides a nail in her mouth, hoping that Papa will get close enough for her to use it to kill him. Eliza does not get a chance to kill Papa, and during the assault, she drops the nail. Following the assault, Eliza keeps the nail, sharpening it and pressing it against her skin to “draw raised bloodied lines on her traitorous body” (95). Eliza’s nail is a symbol for the struggle between shame, guilt, and anger that survivors of sexual assault often feel. Eliza describes her body as “traitorous,” and dragging the nail across her skin serves as her punishment for failing to kill Papa, to protect ConaLee, and to preserve herself for Ephraim. Such feelings are the lasting consequences inflicted on her by sexual assault.

Though the nail is only briefly mentioned, it carries weight beyond Eliza’s use of it in coping with her own trauma. When Eliza blindfolds ConaLee to protect her from the sight of Bart’s dead body, and later, when Dearbhla encourages ConaLee to black out during Papa’s assaults, the nail becomes a symbol of protection. In protecting ConaLee from the trauma of Papa’s assaults, Dearbhla and Eliza are protecting ConaLee from the shame and guilt embodied in the symbol of the nail. Notably, while ConaLee ultimately does not express interest in romance and sex, she does not feel guilty or ashamed of her trauma. In other words, while Eliza is forced to carry her nail of guilt and shame, ConaLee does not need a symbol of her trauma because Eliza and Dearbhla helped her withstand the brute force of Papa’s assaults.

O’Shea’s Eye Patch

O’Shea questions his identity after waking up in Alexandria, and Dr. O’Shea knows that O’Shea will have permanent scarring from the wound to his right temple. O’Shea already has scars from the branding and whipping he faced on the plantation, but the wound to his face is exposed in a way that makes it impossible to fully hide. Instead, O’Shea must wear a conical, tin eye patch, designed both to hide his missing eye and to protect the soft tissue left after the injury. O’Shea’s eye patch is a symbol on multiple levels, representing his trauma, his fear of alienation, and the narrative element of his mistaken identity. The eye patch is both obscuring the scarring that O’Shea maintains from the war and also protective, preventing further injury. This two-fold process is how the eye patch both represents O’Shea’s trauma and protects him from further emotional trauma.

After leaving Dr. O’Shea, O’Shea is withdrawn, and his personality at the asylum is subdued. O’Shea’s fear is that he is a “monster,” and in conversation with Dr. Story, O’Shea reveals that he sees himself as a man of violence, embodied in his military service. However, the eye patch is not a representation of O’Shea’s violence but of the violence inflicted on O’Shea. O’Shea’s fear after the war is that he will hurt others, and yet it is O’Shea’s violence that ultimately kills Papa to protect Eliza. Much like the eye patch, O’Shea is a protective force in the novel, just as he helps Eliza kill the overseer to protect Leena’s son, kills Confederate soldiers in the war to protect the Union, and kills Papa in Dr. Story’s office. Whenever O’Shea uses violence, he does so to protect those close to him, just as the eye patch protects him from physical and emotional harm.

Hatpins

Hatpins are long pins used to hold hats in place. At the asylum, ConaLee asks Eira for hatpins, specifically for their intended purpose: holding a hat to a woman’s hair. However, Eira implies that hatpins are important to their jobs as nurses beyond simply maintaining their appearance. Weed, in his observations of Eira and Ruth, notes that Eira uses hatpins to prick Ruth to stop her from singing. In fact, hatpins had a historical use in women’s self-defense, and the United States passed a law in 1908 to regulate the length of hatpins, fearing that women involved in the suffrage movement would use them as weapons. In Night Watch, hatpins are not a symbol of feminine solidarity, as they were for the suffragettes, but are a symbol of mistreatment and oppression.

Dr. Story explains the “moral treatment” employed by the asylum, in which patients are treated with respect, dignity, and care. However, these ideas were new to the 19th-century treatment of mental health, and other characters, like Eira and Hexum, disagree with many of Dr. Story’s methods. By pricking Ruth with hatpins, Eira is showing her disdain for moral treatment, relying instead on older, brutal methods of handling mental illness. There is a long history of mistreatment of mental health patients in which pricking with hatpins would be a normal and even encouraged behavior. For Eira and Ruth, though, the hatpins reveal the disdain Eira has for Ruth and Ruth’s condition. Pricking Ruth is intended to stop her from singing, and yet the only thing that actually stops Ruth’s singing is Eliza’s interest in Ruth’s delusions. Hatpins, then, are a symbol for not just mistreatment but ineffective treatment, as Eira is unable to help Ruth with her brutal methods.