The Tragedy of Permanence in "Nightwood" Angelique Dagdag College

In the chapter “Go Down, Matthew” of Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, speaking to an ex-priest at the Café de la Mairie du Vie after an extensive and exhausting session of consoling a lamenting Nora Flood, relates himself and the ex-priest to ducks in Golden Gate park. In inebriated exasperation, he proceeds to complain: “…[E]verybody with their damnable kindness having fed [the ducks] all the year round to their ruin because when it comes time for their going south they are all a bitter consternation, being too fat and heavy to rise off the water […] how they flop and struggle all over the park in autumn, crying and tearing their hair out because their nature is weighted down with bread and their migration stopped by crumbs” (160). Though the doctor does not seem to be taken seriously by cafe-goers who observe and await this drunken speech, through this passage, readers derive a further understanding of his attitudes toward both life and the nature of his very being, encapsulating a theme Barnes is working to affirm—a notion of tragic permanence by what you are and how it is bestowed upon you, all if not accepted, becoming the source of one’s own demise.

The ducks, symbolically representing the Doctor’s...