The Midnight Zone Story Analysis Please see the file for Close Reading of a Short Story below and the story and please Make no use of outside research, onl

The Midnight Zone Story Analysis Please see the file for Close Reading of a Short Story below and the story and please Make no use of outside research, only from the story Close Reading of a Short Story
Drafts Due: May 30th
Conferences (with Drafts): May 31st
Final Due: June 3rd
10% of Final Grade
2-3 Revised Pages
MLA Format
Guidelines:
Select a short story that we have read and discussed in class. Write two to three pages that
analyze and interpret the story, paying attention to relevant components, such as
characterization, images, metaphors, descriptive phrases, etc. Your ideas should be organized
and reflected in an interpretive thesis statement, and supported with evidence throughout
your essay.
Make no use of outside research.
Below, you will find step-by-step guidance that will generally mirror our in-class discussion
process and out-of-class reading. The following questions are NOT an outline for how
your paper should be written/organized, but a way to start thinking about what you
find important in the story. The thesis—as well as the essay as a whole—will focus
on specific, related elements. It is likely that several elements in the story seem important.
If these elements are related, and can work to form an interpretive thesis, that is wonderful.
If you notice several elements working in ways that cannot be pulled together into a single
working thesis, some elements will need to be left out in order to create a coherent essay that
follows from the thesis.
To do a close reading, you choose a specific passage, or series of passages, or recurring
elements, and analyze it/them in fine detail, as if with a magnifying glass. Your reactions to
the story are a guide to your interpretation. Close reading is important because it is the
building block for larger analysis. Your thoughts evolve not from someone else’s truth
about the reading, but from your own observations. The more closely you can observe,
the more original and exact your ideas will be. To begin your close reading, ask yourself
several specific questions about the passage. The following questions are not a formula, but a
starting point for your own thoughts. When you arrive at some answers, you are ready to
organize and write.
First Impressions:
What is the first thing you notice about the passage?
What is the second thing?
Do the two things you noticed complement each other? Or contradict each other?
What mood does the passage create in you? Why?
Vocabulary and Diction:
Which words do you notice first? Why? What is noteworthy about this diction?
How do the important words relate to one another?
Do any words seem oddly used to you? Why?
Do any words have double meanings? Do they have extra connotations?
Look up any unfamiliar words.
Discerning Patterns:
Does an image here remind you of an image elsewhere? Where? What’s the
connection?
How might this image fit into the pattern of the piece as a whole?
What is the sentence rhythm like? Short and choppy? Long and flowing? Does it
build on itself or stay at an even pace?
Look at the punctuation. Is there anything unusual about it?
Is there any repetition within the passage? What is the effect of that repetition?
Point of View and Characterization:
How does the passage make us react or think about any characters or events within
the narrative?
Are there colors, sounds, physical descriptions that appeal to the senses? Does this
imagery form a pattern? Why might the author have chosen that color,
sound or physical description?
Who speaks in the passage? To whom does he or she speak?
Symbolism:
Are there metaphors? What kinds?
Is there one controlling metaphor? If not, how many different metaphors are there,
and in what order do they occur? How might that be significant?
How might objects represent something else?
Do any of the objects, colors, animals, or plants appearing in the passage have
traditional connotations or meaning? What about religious significance?
Essay Checklist
o Does your essay have an interpretive thesis statement?
o Do the paragraphs that follow from the thesis logically support that statement?
o Are the ideas in the essay your own? (Meaning, they have not been influenced by
others—academic research or work published online.)
o Has information that does not relate to or support the thesis statement been
removed from the essay?
o Have you cited your quotations and paraphrases within the text? (Using MLA
format.)
o Have you included a Works Cited page?
o Have you or a friend gone over the essay to check for grammar and larger
organizational errors?
“The Midnight Zone,” by Lauren Groff | The New Yorker
5/19/19, 10:22 AM
Fiction
The Midnight Zone
By Lauren Groff
May 16, 2016
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“The Midnight Zone,” by Lauren Groff | The New Yorker
5/19/19, 10:22 AM
Illustration by Jason Holley
Audio: Lauren Gro? reads.
t was an old hunting camp shipwrecked in twenty miles of scrub. Our friend
had seen a Florida panther sliding through the trees there a few days earlier.
But things had been fraying in our hands, and the camp was free and silent, so I
walked through the resistance of my cautious husband and my small boys, who
had wanted hermit crabs and kites and wakeboards and sand for spring break.
Instead, they got ancient sinkholes !lled with ferns, potential death by cat.
I
One thing I liked was how the screens at night pulsed with the tender bellies of
lizards.
Even in the sleeping bag with my smaller son, the golden one, the March chill
seemed to blow through my bones. I loved eating, but I’d lost so much weight by
then that I carried myself delicately, as if I’d gone translucent.
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“The Midnight Zone,” by Lauren Groff | The New Yorker
5/19/19, 10:22 AM
There was sparse electricity from a gas-powered generator and no Internet and
you had to climb out through the window in the loft and stand on the roof to
get a cell signal. On the third day, the boys were asleep and I’d dimmed the
lanterns when my husband went up and out and I heard him stepping on the
metal roof, a giant brother to the raccoons that woke us thumping around up
there at night like burglars.
Then my husband stopped moving, and stood still for so long I forgot where he
was. When he came down the ladder from the loft, his face had blanched.
Who died? I said lightly, because if anyone was going to die it was going to be
us, our skulls popping in the jaws of an endangered cat. It turned out to be a bad
joke, because someone actually had died, that morning, in one of my husband’s
apartment buildings. A !fth-“oor occupant had killed herself, maybe on
purpose, with aspirin and vodka and a bathtub. Floors four, three, and two were
away somewhere with beaches and alcoholic smoothies, and the !rst “oor had
discovered the problem only when the water of death had seeped into the carpet.
My husband had to leave. He’d just !red one handyman and the other was on
his own Caribbean adventure, eating bu?et food to the sound of cruise-ship
calypso. Let’s pack, my husband said, but my rebelliousness at the time was like a
sticky fog rolling through my body and never burning o?, there was no sun
inside, and so I said that the boys and I would stay. He looked at me as if I were
crazy and asked how we’d manage with no car. I asked if he thought he’d
married an incompetent woman, which cut to the bone, because the source of
our problems was that, in fact, he had. For years at a time I was good only at the
things that interested me, and since all that interested me was my work and my
children, the rest of life had sort of inched away. And while it’s true that my
children were endlessly fascinating, two petri dishes growing human cultures,
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“The Midnight Zone,” by Lauren Groff | The New Yorker
5/19/19, 10:22 AM
being a mother never had been, and all that seemed assigned by default of
gender I would not do because it felt insulting. I would not buy clothes, I would
not make dinner, I would not keep schedules, I would not make playdates, never
ever. Motherhood meant, for me, that I would take the boys on monthlong
adventures to Europe, teach them to blast o? rockets, to swim for glory. I taught
them how to read, but they could make their own lunches. I would hug them as
long as they wanted to be hugged, but that was just being human. My husband
had to be the one to make up for the depths of my lack. It is exhausting, living in
debt that increases every day but that you have no intention of repaying.
wo days, he promised. Two days and he’d be back by noon on the third. He
bent to kiss me, but I gave him my cheek and rolled over when the
headlights blazed then dwindled on the wall. In the banishing of the engine, the
night grew bold. The wind was making a low, inhuman muttering in the pines,
and, inspired, the animals let loose in call-and-response. Everything kept me
alert until shortly before dawn, when I slept for a few minutes until the puppy
whined and woke me. My older son was crying because he’d thrown o? his
sleeping bag in the night and was cold but too sleepy to !x the situation.
T
VIDEO FROM THE N! YORKER
Dreaming Gave Us Wings
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“The Midnight Zone,” by Lauren Groff | The New Yorker
5/19/19, 10:22 AM
I made scrambled eggs with a vengeful amount of butter and Cheddar, also
cocoa with an inch of marshmallow, thinking I would stupefy my children with
calories, but the calories only made them stronger.
Our friend had treated the perimeter of the clearing with panther deterrent,
some kind of synthetic superpredator urine, and we felt safe-ish near the cabin.
We ran footraces until the dog went wild and leapt up and bit my children’s arms
with her puppy teeth, and the boys screamed with pain and frustration and
showed me the pink stripes on their skin. I scolded the puppy harshly and she
crept o? to the porch to watch us with her chin on her paws. The boys and I
played soccer. We rocked in the hammock. We watched the circling redshouldered hawks. I made my older son read “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
to the little one, which was a disaster, a book so punny and Victorian for modern
children. We had lunch, then the older boy tried to make !re by rubbing sticks
together, his little brother attending solemnly, and they spent the rest of the day
constructing a hut out of branches. Then dinner, singing songs, a bath in the
galvanized-steel horse trough someone had converted to a cold-water tub,
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“The Midnight Zone,” by Lauren Groff | The New Yorker
5/19/19, 10:22 AM
picking ticks and chiggers o? with tweezers, and that was it for the !rst day.
There had been a weight on us as we played outside, not as if something were
actually watching but because of the possibility that something could be
watching when we were so far from humanity in all that Florida waste.
The second day should have been like the !rst. I doubled down on the calories,
adding pancakes to breakfast, and succeeded in making the boys lie in pensive
digestion out in the hammock for a little while before they ricocheted o? the
trees.
But in the afternoon the one light bulb sizzled out. The cabin was all dark wood
and I couldn’t see the patterns on the dishes I was washing. I found a new bulb
in a closet, dragged over a stool from the bar area, and made the older boy hold
the spinning seat as I climbed aboard. The old bulb was hot, and I was passing it
from hand to hand, holding the new bulb under my arm, when the puppy leapt
up at my older son’s face. He let go of the stool to whack at her, and I did a
quarter spin, then fell and hit the “oor with my head, and then I surely blacked
out.
A
fter a while, I opened my eyes. Two children were looking down at me.
They were pale and familiar. One fair, one dark; one small, one big.
Mommy? the little boy said, through water.
I turned my head and threw up on the “oor. The bigger boy dragged a puppy,
who was snu?ing my face, out the door.
I knew very little except that I was in pain and that I shouldn’t move. The older
boy bent over me, then lifted an intact light bulb from my armpit, triumphantly;
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“The Midnight Zone,” by Lauren Groff | The New Yorker
5/19/19, 10:22 AM
I a chicken, the bulb an egg.
The smaller boy had a wet paper towel in his hand and he was patting my
cheeks. The pulpy smell made me ill again. I closed my eyes and felt the dabbing
on my forehead, on my neck, around my mouth. The small child’s voice was
high. He was singing a song.
I started to cry with my eyes closed and the tears went hot across my temples
and into my ears.
Mommy! the older boy, the solemn dark one, screamed, and when I opened my
eyes both of the children were crying, and that was how I knew them to be
mine.
Just let me rest here a minute, I said. They took my hands. I could feel the hot
hands of my children, which was good. I moved my toes, then my feet. I turned
my head back and forth. My neck worked, though !reworks went o? in the
corners of my eyes.
I can walk to town, the older boy was saying, through wadding, to his brother,
but the nearest town was twenty miles away. Safety was twenty miles away and
there was a panther between us and there, but also possibly terrible men,
sinkholes, alligators, the end of the world. There was no landline, no umbilical
cord, and small boys using cell phones would easily fall o? such a slick, pitched
metal roof.
But what if she’s all a sudden dead and I’m all a sudden alone? the little boy was
saying.
O.K., I’m sitting up now, I said.
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“The Midnight Zone,” by Lauren Groff | The New Yorker
5/19/19, 10:22 AM
The puppy was howling at the door.
I lifted my body onto my elbows. Gingerly, I sat. The cabin dipped and spun and
I vomited again.
The big boy ran out and came back with a broom to clean up. No! I said. I am
always too hard on him, this beautiful child who is so brilliant, who has no logic
at all.
Sweetness, I said, and couldn’t stop crying, because I’d called him Sweetness
instead of his name, which I couldn’t remember just then. I took !ve or six deep
breaths. Thank you, I said in a calmer voice. Just throw a whole bunch of paper
towels on it and drag the rug over it to keep the dog o?. The little one did so,
methodically, which was not his style; he has always been adept at cheerfully
watching other people work for him.
The bigger boy tried to get me to drink water, because this is what we do in our
family in lieu of applying Band-Aids, which I refuse to buy because they are just
“esh-colored land!ll.
Then the little boy screamed, because he’d moved around me and seen the
bloody back of my head, and then he dabbed at the cut with the paper towel he
had previously dabbed at my pukey mouth. The paper disintegrated in his hands.
He crawled into my lap and put his face on my stomach. The bigger boy held
something cold on my wound, which I discovered later to be a beer can from the
fridge.
They were quiet like this for a very long time. The boys’ names came back to me,
at !rst dancing coyly out of reach, then, when I seized them in my hands, mine.
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“The Midnight Zone,” by Lauren Groff | The New Yorker
5/19/19, 10:22 AM
I’d been a soccer player in high school, a speedy and aggressive mid!elder, and
head trauma was an old friend. I remembered this constant lability from one
concussive visit to the emergency room. The confusion and the sense of doom
were also familiar. I had a “ash of my mother sitting beside my bed for an entire
night, shaking me awake whenever I tried to fall asleep, and I now wanted my
mother, not in her diminished current state, brittle retiree, but as she had been
when I was young, a small person but gigantic, a person who had blocked out the
sun.
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I sent the little boy o? to get a roll of dusty duct tape, the bigger boy to get
gauze from my toiletry kit, and when they wandered back I duct-taped the gauze
to my head, already mourning my long hair, which had been my most expensive
pet.
I inched myself across the room to the bed and climbed up, despite the sparklers
behind my eyeballs. The boys let the forlorn puppy in, and when they opened
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“The Midnight Zone,” by Lauren Groff | The New Yorker
5/19/19, 10:22 AM
the door they also let the night in, because my fall had taken hours from our
lives.
It was only then, when the night entered, that I understood the depth of time we
had yet to face. I had the boys bring me the lanterns, then a can opener and the
tuna and the beans, which I opened slowly, because it is not easy, supine, and we
made a game out of eating, though the thought of eating anything gave me
chills. The older boy brought over Mason jars of milk. I let my children !nish
the entire half gallon of ice cream, which was my husband’s, his one daily reward
for being kind and good, but by this point the man deserved our disloyalty,
because he was not there.
It had started raining, at !rst a gentle thrumming on the metal roof.
I tried to tell my children a cautionary tale about a little girl who fell into a well
and had to wait a week until !re!ghters could !gure out a way to rescue her,
something that maybe actually took place back in the dimness of my childhood,
but the story was either too abstract for them or I wasn’t making much sense,
and they didn’t seem to grasp my need for them to stay in the cabin, to not go
anywhere, if the very worst happened, the unthinkable that I was skirting, like a
pit that opened just in front of each sentence I was about to utter. They kept
asking me if the girl got lots of toys when she made it out of the well. This was
so against my point that I said, out of spite, Unfortunately, no, she did not.
I made the boys keep me awake with stories. The younger one was into a British
television show about marine life, which the older one maintained was babyish
until I pretended not to believe what they were telling me. Then they both told
me about cookie-cutter sharks, who bore perfect round holes in whales, as if
their mouths were cookie cutters. They told me about a !sh called the
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“The Midnight Zone,” by Lauren Groff | The New Yorker
5/19/19, 10:22 AM
humuhumunukunuku?pua‘a, a beautiful name that I couldn’t say correctly, even
though they sang it to me over and over, laughing, to the tune of “Twinkle
Twinkle, Little Star.” They told me about the walking cat!sh, which can stay out
of water for days and days, meandering about in the mud. They told me about
the sunlight, the twilight, and the midnight zones, the three depths of water,
where there is transparent light, then a murky, darkish light, then no light at all.
They told me about the world pool, in which one current goes one way, another
goes another way, and where they meet they make a tornado of air, which
stretches, my little one said, from the midnight zone, where the !sh are blind, all
the way up up up to the birds.
I had begun shaking very hard, which my children, sudden g…
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