36 pages 1 hour read

Nightwood

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1936

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Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 5 Summary: "Watchman, What of the Night?"

After her separation from Robin, Nora is in a tortured state and goes unannounced to O’Connor’s room at a boarding house, looking for comfort that he cannot give. It’s about three o’clock in the morning, and she finds him in a bed covered in “dirty linen” and dressed as a woman; he wears a “woman’s flannel night gown” and “a wig with long pendent curls,” and he has rouged his face and painted his lashes (85). The doctor attempts to hide all of this from Nora by snatching the wig from his head, but it’s too late. He had been expecting a different visitor, and this is why he had called out for her to enter.

Setting her embarrassment aside, Nora’s first words to O’Connor are: “Doctor, I have come to ask you everything you know about the night” (86). The doctor then commences one of his lengthy monologues, telling her that “night does something to a person’s identity, even when asleep,” and describes the way lovers can betray each other by lying with another person in their dreams (87). Important O’Connor’s explanation of the night is the distinction he makes about French nights and their peculiarity: “The night and the day are two travels [...] we tear up one for the sake of the other; not so the French” (91). He then contrasts the French with the American, who “separates the two for fear of indignities”(91).

Later in the chapter, O’Connor tells Nora how he has always wished to be a woman, “with a womb as big as the king’s kettle” (97) and how this want has caused his unhappiness.

Nora, however, is consumed with her own problems and asks O’Connor what will become of Robin. She also asks him to describe Jenny for her. The doctor recounts all the details of the fight between Robin and Jenny on the night of the carriage ride, and how, in that moment, he predicted that Nora would “leave that girl some day; but though those two are buried at opposite ends of the earth, one dang will find them both” (113).

Chapter 6 Summary: "Where the Tree Falls"

This chapter focuses on Felix’s life after Robin leaves him, highlighting his anxiety about his son Guido’s health and mental wellbeing in the absence of his mother.

By this time, Felix has given up his job at the bank, “though not his connections with it,” and made a habit of traveling to many different countries just to stand outside “that country’s palace gate” or visit churches (114).

Felix is increasingly worried about the development of his son, Guido, who is “mentally deficient and emotionally excessive” (114). Guido is the one who asked to visit churches, a request that startled Felix at the time. Understanding Guido to be “too estranged to be argued with,” Felix acquiesces, taking him on tours of churches and buying him a metal Virgin to hang around his neck with a red ribbon. In the moment of placing the ribbon around his son’s “slight neck,” Felix is reminded of Robin and notices how Guido resembles her (115).

After writing a letter to the Pope, Felix decides to relocate to Vienna, so that should his son be “chosen” to join the church as a priest, it will be in his native Austria.

Before leaving Paris, Felix seeks out O’Connor, who is on his way to his favorite cafe after attending a funeral. Felix tells O’Connor that he has been in “mental trouble” and invites him to dinner so that—much like Nora in the previous chapter—he can confide in him about his failed relationship with Robin (118).

Felix shares that “the Petherbridge woman” had “called on” him (121). This surprises O’Connor, who likes to believe he is up on the latest gossip. Under the guise of wanting to buy an old painting from him, Jenny Petherbridge had gained access to Felix at home, using the opportunity to share information about a woman she had living with her. Felix does not realize until later that the woman Jenny speaks of is Robin—a detail that distresses both Felix and his son, Guido, who is present during the visit.

Over the course of their dinner together, Felix and O’Connor discuss Guido’s similarities to Robin and his “maladjusted” personality (124).

The chapter ends by flashing forward to Felix’s arrival in Vienna on a cold night. Frau Mann accompanies him and Guido on the journey. Once in Vienna, Felix and Frau Mann make a habit of visiting cafes and drinking beer until they are drunk. Guido watches them.

Chapter 7 Summary: "Go Down, Matthew"

O’Connor pays a visit to Nora one afternoon while she is busy writing a letter to Robin. Over the course of the visit, he pleads with her to stop writing, saying “Isn’t it bitter enough for Robin that she is lost somewhere without receiving mail?” (132). Nora refuses to take his advice and replies, “If I don’t write to her, what am I to do? I can’t sit here for ever—thinking!” (133).

O’Connor is indignant, accusing Nora of trying to “unspin fate” in her effort to find Robin (133). Nora confesses that “once, when she was sleeping, I wanted her to die" (137). Acknowledging how distraught and “in trouble” Nora still is, the doctor tells her he wishes there was a holiday where he’d be allowed to “whack [Nora’s] head off” to relieve her of her misery (137).

O’Connor describes Nora’s condition as “the inbreeding of pain” and reminds her that she is not the only one has suffered (138). He encourages her to accept it, since it cannot be changed, by telling her, “My war brought me many things; let yours bring you as much” (137).

After expounding on “the invert [...] the girl lost [...] the pretty lad who is a girl” (145), he goes on to describe himself as “the Old Woman who lives in the closet” (146).

Nora is not concerned with O’Connor’s emotional problems related to his gender identity and continues to talk about Jenny Petherbridge and how even when Robin returned to her for “sleep and safety [...] she always went out again” (147)

Nora recounts how she visited Jenny, asking if she was Robin’s lover, and how Jenny “went to pieces” (150). After confirming her suspicions, she returned home to Robin and told her their relationship was over. O’Connor tries to comfort Nora but fails. Nora tells him in detail of a night when she went out to help Robin, who was too drunk to get home, and Robin yelled at her, saying, “You are a devil!” as a crowd collected (152).

O’Connor can no longer take Nora’s fruitless agonizing over Robin and chides her: “A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart!” (164). He leaves Nora and heads to a café, where he gets very drunk and tells an ex-priest and the other patrons there how everyone comes to him with their personal problems: “Talking to me—all of them—sitting on me as heavy as a truck horse—talking!” (175).

Chapter 8 Summary: "The Possessed"

In this short, final chapter, Robin arrives in New York with Jenny but refuses to put down roots in America with her, instead insisting that “a hotel was ‘good enough’” (176). After a few weeks, she reverts to her old pattern of going out alone, “wandering without design” and taking trains to different parts of the country (176). She walks in the “open country” and speaks in a low voice “to the animals” (177). Jenny blames this behavior on what she thinks is Robin’s relationship with “unclean spirits” (177).

Robin travels north to the part of America where Nora is from and creates a makeshift settlement in the old chapel on Nora’s property. Nora is living here once again, but whether Robin is aware of this is unclear. Stirred by the unusual barking of her dog, Nora is compelled to stumble uphill through the darkness of night, until she arrives at the chapel and finds Robin dressed in boy’s trousers and standing in front of lit candles on the altar.

At the moment Nora arrives, bumping into the door jamb, Robin goes down to her hands and knees and begins to act like a dog. Robin even barks at Nora’s dog, who is howling and biting at her. The two continue to move frantically and butt heads, letting out “low down in [the] throat crying” until both give up and lay down together (180).

Chapter 5-8 Analysis

The final four chapters of the novel continue to move forward in time and explore how characters cope after their respective relationships with Robin dissolve. The chapters loosely mirror the organization of the first half of the book via check-ins with characters, by way of heart-to-heart conversations with the doctor, much in the way the first group of chapters introduces each character by placing their backstory at the center of a chapter. The doctor's presence threads these chapters together.

The second half of the book also expands the idea of who is affected by Robin's broken love affairs and addresses the ripple effect of her actions. Chapter 6 features Felix's last visit with the doctor. By jumping forward a decade from their first meeting, it highlights how only time can reveal the full effects of Robin's choices. In that time, her son, Guido, has grown to be 10 years old but shows signs of slow mental and physical development. He has also come to show a predisposition to obsessive behavior like his mother; for a boy of his age, he is overly interested in churches and religion.

The doctor is also indirectly affected by Robin's actions over time. While he was never in a romantic relationship with Robin, O’Connor has arguably dealt with sorting through the complicated and painful emotions her affairs create more than any of her lovers have. Due to his reputation as the go-to person for life advice, he has been forced to perform a heavy load of emotional labor every time Nora or Felix visits him with their Robin-related problems. Over time, the weight of this work wears on him, and he snaps. The last time the reader sees the doctor he is drunk, unloading his troubles on strangers in a bar, as he has no one else in his life who will listen to him.

The only character who does not talk to another human about her heartache and struggles is Robin. Instead, her capacity for human interaction seems to atrophy over the course of the novel, until her only mode of expressing herself is by uttering non-human sounds.

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