The Night Watchman Essay Questions

Identify and describe the importance of communication between women in the novel.

Violence, death, and disappearance are omnipresent facts of life for Native American women in The Night Watchman, as evidenced in the novel by Vera's disappearance and Patrice's near rape at the hands of an old friend. In light of this reality, communication between women occurs in clandestine ways and serves their mutual protection.

After Patrice and Zhaanat realize that they are both having haunted dreams about Vera, they realize that she is trying to communicate with them through their dreams. Missing and separated, Vera nonetheless is able to connect with her mother and sister on a mystical level that would likely be unintelligible to anyone else besides themselves. While they are unable to use these dreams to help find Vera, they instinctually trust the dreams and, based on them, know that Vera is alive. When Thomas suggests that they go to the police with the information that they have received from Vera in their dreams, Patrice and Vera are disappointed that he would trust their enemies. In that moment, their mutual understanding goes deeper than Thomas is able to understand and is rooted in their female distrust of institutions that have repeatedly failed them.

Patrice, once she learns that Betty is sexually experienced, seeks her out for a private conversation on a Saturday in order to prepare herself for having sex. In this case, by defying prescriptive norms about women and sex, they carve out a space to freely communicate about their own experiences and exchange advice. This is both to satisfy Patrice's curiosity, but more urgently, to prepare her with the words and skills to navigate it successfully and safely.

What is the significance of Roderick as a ghost in the novel? Why does he remain a ghost?

The significance of Roderick as a ghost only gradually unfolds over time. He appears in the novel because his old friend, LaBette, has asked him to come and protect him. Their prior relationship is later revealed. They had been classmates at a government boarding school. Roderick had taken a punishment meant for LaBette and was sent to a cellar by the schoolteacher. He got sick from the cellar and was sent to a sanatorium, where he later died and was sent back to the reservation in a coffin.

His ghostliness speaks to the profound alienation and dislocation that comes from being a colonized and unsuccessfully assimilated subject. At boarding school, he was prohibited from speaking his native tongue and physically punished to become a more "Americanized" and disciplined student. Yet the color line remains even after death; he cannot enter "white hell" or "white heaven" as an Indian ghost.

While he cannot join the whites in heaven or hell, neither can he return to the reservation and join the living. He describes himself as a "runner," someone who has been on the run his whole life. Exile expresses itself as a spectral condition. Ultimately, he is able to settle down but not on the reservation—in a large urban city, Washington D.C., full of fellow Indian ghosts. While he is unable to escape his ghostly form, he is able to find company—other alienated Indians living in a ghostly exile.

Describe the subject-position of Millie Cloud in the novel and how it changes as the novel progresses.

While Millie Cloud enters late in the narrative as an outsider, she ends embraced as a sister by Patrice and remains in their lives as an anthropologist doing fieldwork.

Her subject position is crisscrossed along multiple axes of identity that structure the ways in which she relates to others. She is an academic who just completed her master's degree and is on the way to her PhD. She is also part Chippewa by way of her father, Louis Pipestone, albeit raised by her single, white mother outside of the reservation. She is unfamiliar with tribal practices and language but fascinated by them. She is constantly observing and taking notes, which leads her to switch focus from economics to anthropology for her PhD. She is also a single, working woman with a tendency to speak directly and abruptly, which she notes is why men do not like her. While she is older and more educated than Patrice, she is insecure about her speaking abilities and tries to get Patrice to replace her on the trip to Washington D.C. She is able to strike up an intimate relationship with Patrice that blurs the lines of intimacy. While they strike an intimate relationship, she is also someone whom Patrice and others look up to and who gives them advice about attending college and law school.

Describe the narrative structure and point of view of the novel.

The novel is told from an omniscient, third-person point of view that weaves the lives of different characters together in an interconnected tapestry that builds meaning with the addition of each anecdote. In this way, the whole of the novel is structurally bound with the unfolding lives of each character. Different narrative threads are intermittently picked up and put down as the focus switches from character to character. The tight-knit setting of the novel—the community of Turtle Mountain—facilitates the sense of interdependence because each character already bears some relation to another. For example, Thomas is the husband to Rose and father to their children. He is also the uncle of Patrice and cousin of Zhaanat. Juggie Blue is the mother to Wood Mountain, but she is also the aunt of Valentine, who works with Patrice at the factory, and cook for Lloyd Barnes.

Describe the tone of the novel and how the narrator relates to the characters.

The tone of the novel is deeply steeped in a humane sympathy and familiarity toward its characters. The sympathetic and intimate tone comes through particularly when describing the characters' routines: Thomas drinking the hot coffee that Rose has prepared for him for his night shift; Patrice cutting up wood after getting home from school; Juggie cooking her well-loved soup. Other times, when describing situations that are horrifically removed from the orbit of communal life, such as Vera's captivity, the tone becomes more abstract and cryptic, sparse on detail, emulating the character's isolation.