The Last Night She Lived, By Emily Dickinson

“The Last Night She Lived”, by Emily Dickinson, told more about the living people’s response, one that was more bitter than remorseful, to the death rather than the actual death of the female character. Strangely enough, the narrator makes no comment of the afterlife and goes as far as referring to the setting by saying, “it was a common night” which struck as peculiar because the night of a death is anything but a “common night”. This simple phrase showed the narrator’s nonchalant attitude towards the death of the woman.The narrator goes on to say, “As we went out and in between her final room and rooms were those to be alive tomorrow,” which showed the insensitivity the narrator and the others had for the upcoming death. By differentiating between those who will live tomorrow and those who will not, the narrator is alienating herself and the others from the dying woman.

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Her attempts to alienate herself away from the woman by labeling a room for the living and a room for the dead or dying shows the narrator’s insensitivity to the condition that the female character is in. Not only did the narrator alienate herself from the woman but also she referred to the night that the woman is dying during as a “common night”; this phrase shows the nonchalant (or uncaring) feelings that the narrator has for the woman. Lastly, the narrator’s past with the woman is shown as the narrator commented on how the woman “blamed that the others could exist while she must finish, quite a jealousy for her arose.” By saying this, the narrator attempted to justify to the audience on why her and the others were nonchalant about the upcoming death of the woman by telling them that she was a jealous, bitter women; however, the justification came too late as the audience has already labeled the narrator as the “bad guy’ due to the fact that she was nonchalant and hostile to the dying