Night Walker By Brent Staples

The short essay “Night Walker” by Brent Staples is a story of alienation, and how he experiences it, feels about it, and deals with it. He is just beginning his first graduate year of college, walking down the street when he experiences a strong feeling of alienation. He gets strange looks from people and is avoided, like a leper. Elie Wiesel in Night also feels alienation from the people around him, being forced into a prison by the Nazis and barely surviving, going through beatings, starvation, illness, and other horrible trials. Both Wiesel and Staples feel alienation because of their culture and their community, which causes their public lifestyle to be less than normal. In “Night Walker,” Staples depicts the scene where he first encounters fear and alienation based on his race, gender, age, and location at that certain time of day. He is in a neighborhood known for muggings, and being a

Staples cannot change the way people think about him, but he can make them be less wary, such as when he starts to “whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and more popular classical composers” (Staples 3) to make them realize that “a mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selection from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons” (Staples 3). By whistling classical music, he eased the nerves of the nervous white people around him. All Wiesel can do to aid for the better his situation is be the best prisoner he can be and not cause trouble. If he did cause trouble and mischief, he would prove his captors correct in thinking he is a savage and inferior to them. He did exactly as the SS and the guards said in the camps, he learned how to act with other prisoners, and other ways to keep himself alive, from experience on what not to do, and from hearing from other prisoners