Nighttime Quotes And Analysis

Mick’s connection to music and nighttime becomes a pivotal scene to her development in part two of the novel. Her connection to night is unique because it reveals that Mick can only be herself at night. Throughout the night Mick is able to live the luxuries she isn’t able to live in her own house which is to listen to music on a radio. The most important night comes after her party when she encounters Beethoven’s third symphony after her party. Adolescence brings many struggles for Mick and one of them is the social world of high school, the narrator states, “Here was the thing that soon began to bother her. In the halls the people would walk up and down together and everybody seemed to belong to some special bunch” (104). Mick’s party represents

By drawing age distinctions Mick is suggesting that she no longer wants to associate with children. Yet her whole party is a performance because it is inauthentic. Mick steps in her sister’s clothes and they do not fit physically but they also don’t fit into Mick’s mental image of herself, the narrator states, “She was so tall that the dress came up two or three inches above her ankles – and the shoes were so short they hurt her” (107). The fact that the clothes don’t fit her well suggests that Mick isn’t a girl that will fit into the preconceived notions of a beauty and femininity. Her hair is also a trouble because it takes her time to tame it down to curls. The fact that her hair can’t be tamed suggests that Mick is too wild herself and she cannot be tamed by the inflictions of femininity. When the younger kids trespass into Mick’s party it represents the conflict between Mick’s childhood and adolescence. The kids are all under twelve and when Mick looks at them she is conflicted between two emotions – sadness and concern, the narrator states, “She thought of two feelings when she saw those kids – one sad and the other was a kind of warning”