“In an atmosphere of furious accusation and hysterical rumor, an atmosphere in which hearsay and gossip have so thoroughly replaced the careful assessment of evidence that impartiality itself seems of the devil’s party, it may be useful to adopt a calmer tone and to state what it is that we actually know.”
“The Sisterhood of Night” starts off with these rational words. However, they are soon forgotten by the reader when several witnesses testify against the sisterhood. It is as if not just the townspeople but the reader as well expect a dark secret to be uncovered. In the end, the narrator again reminds everyone to focus only on the facts that are known, which means we know nothing that would place the sisterhood in a dark light.
“That’s all over.”
The moment before he is shot by Martha’s husband, Harter recollects a memory of a cowboy at a penny arcade. By saying that’s all over, he indicates that the childhood memory is over, and that he does not want to seek thrills in dangerous situations such as an affair. After all, he spends much of the journey to the duel in self-reflection. However, this change of character comes too late.
“Here there is only the death of dreams, dark laughter of fallen angels with hellfire wings.”
As soon as the balloon reaches a height of 10,000 feet, the narrator is overcome by a feeling of indifference because he can see only nature and no more humans. It appears to him that all the little dreams that humans have are meaningless in the vast expanse of nature.
“To be Kaspar Hauser is to long, at every moment of your dubious existence, with every fiber of your questionable being, not to be Kaspar Hauser.”
Hauser expresses his longing for being ordinary after spending much of his life in solitary confinement. He has been studied extensively, and now wants to change completely to become an ordinary citizen of Nuremberg.
“You who mock us, you laughers and surface-crawlers, you restless sideways-sliders and flatland voyagers—don’t we irk you, don’t we exasperate you, we mole-folk, we pale amphibians?”
The narrator suspects that he and the inhabitants of his town are envied by others who do not have a labyrinth beneath their towns. After all, not only is there a sense of exhilaration when they enter the labyrinth but there is also a sense of elation when they return to the surface, which allows them to see the ordinary world in a new light.
