The Night Watchman Literary Elements

Historical fiction; literary fiction

Turtle Mountain reservation in North Dakota

The third-person perspective in the novel is both deeply expansive and immersive. The omniscient narrator encompasses and weaves together many different individual threads to create a kind of conversation within a community. While Thomas and Patrice stand out as more individuated characters with fully-fleshed storylines, no single individual eclipses the narration, which smoothly moves between different and outwardly expanding scales of the individual, community, history, and cosmic.

The novel possesses a strongly empathetic and humanist tone and mood. As evidenced by the employment of the plural third-person pronoun, "we," the narrator also identifies with the characters and their community, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewas.

Because the novel works at different micro and macro scales, there are different kinds of protagonists and antagonists. There is the collective protagonist of the Turtle Mountain Band, which faces termination at the hands of the US Congress. There is also the protagonist Thomas Wazhashk, the night watchman and leader of the fight against termination, and his primary antagonist, Arthur V. Watkins, the Mormon congressman leading the termination bill.

The novel carves out smaller pockets of interpersonal struggles within the larger historic struggle of Turtle Mountain against Congressional termination, which is another iteration of the United States' genocidal policies against the indigenous people living on the land, the primary historical conflict. However, there are other conflicts unfolding on a human, smaller scale that vivify what is at stake with the termination bill.

For example, there is Patrice's desperate search for her missing and possibly murdered older sister, Vera. Her father is a roaming alcoholic and has become a terror to her family. Poverty is a generic feature of life in Turtle Rock and drives many of the minor conflicts.

Since the novel does not follow a single linear narrative, but rather weaves together multiple storylines in an episodic fashion, there are many different points of climax. Perhaps the most visible one is when the Turtle Mountain delegation arrives in Washington and delivers their testimony to Congress.

"I miss my little owl," said Thomas. "The one I had as a pet. He nested in the barn bones of the roof."
Louis glanced sharply over at him.
"The barn poles," said Thomas. For a while he was silent.
"Rafters," he said in a low voice.

This passage foreshadows Thomas losing his memory and his larger mental deterioration.

"All rested their unguarded expressions upon him and he accepted the gravity of their regard. When he turned back, he felt that something had been communicated to him. He felt it up behind his eyes as dry tears. Holmes picked up where he'd left off." (196)

In this passage, Thomas is looking at an audience of fellow American Indians from different tribes who have gathered in the same town to understand the implications of the new "emancipation" bill, which is being read out loud by a white man, Holmes. Thomas turns around and takes in the crowd of Indians gathered behind him during a pause in the reading. The enormity of their emotion is unarticulated—either in spoken or written words—but is expressed in a silent regard, which is powerful enough to well up "dry tears" in Thomas. The silence of their regard is juxtaposed with the voluble droning of Holmes reading the bill out loud and highlights how the depth of their sentiment cannot be fully articulated in words.

When Wood Mountain sees Patrice wears her new eyeglasses for the first time, he comments that she looks like "Clark Kent's girlfriend," which she rejects, saying that she looks like "Clark Kent" himself. The name is an allusion to Superman, the iconic fictional superhero created by D.C. Comics and perpetuated by many American movies. Superman, whose human name is Clark Kent, has many superpowers, including supernatural strength and impervious skin, symbolizing ideals of strength and independence that define an idealized American masculinity. By referring to herself as Clark Kent, Patrice appropriates and reembodies these ideals, but within her own feminine and indigenous personality and body.

"She opened her eyes. Sunlight through a foggy window. A green plant on a shelf. The dim delicious fall air. She was a new baby—skin frail as paper, arms weak as milk, brain forming shapes into thought." (300)

The language paints an image of Vera emerging from her bath as a newborn baby.

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"Time is nothing but everything, not the seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. Yet this substanceless substance, this bending and shaping, this warping, this is the way we understand our world." (193)

The repetition of the definite pronoun "this" followed by gerunds creates a sense of repetitive movement in figuring time.

"Even before he briefly uncovered the face, she knew the shoes. Thin shoes with holes showing the pasteboard he wore inside. He father's shoes. And the liquor bottles. Empty pints, six or more. His death had probably been painless." (317)

The tattered state of the shoes gives away the identity of the body: Patrice's father.

"Then she entered. All was too still. Death was in the house." (146)

Death is personified as a person visiting a house.

"Her hatred was so malignant it had lifted out of her like a night bird. It had flown straight to Bucky and sank its beak into the side of his face." (352)

Patrice's hatred is personified as a bird that attacks a man who tried to rape her. The personification gives vivid agency to Patrice's hatred.