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Post by Mina Kaneko on Sept 2, 2015 12:36:58 GMT
“The Third Night,” by Natsume Soseki delighted me – if at first I was intrigued, pulled into a surreal dreamscape, then by the end I was pleasantly shocked, and ironically, pulled into a nightmarish reality. It’s this juxtaposition that makes the story so delightful. One expects – after reading about a child, blue, bald, blind, mysteriously clinging to the narrator’s back, for reasons unbeknownst to him – to continue following the narrator within this dreamscape. Where will the baby lead him? Where are they? What are they doing? What does he mean by “you know well enough”? The child makes precocious, knowing allusions to things that even the narrator feels a seeping dread of something he knows unconsciously already. We don’t know what this is of course, until the very end, and neither does the narrator. It’s a haunting dream that unveils a more haunting truth.
I also particularly delight in this uncomfortable feeling of not being sure whether to trust or feel good about the narrator, the person who is telling the story. When we realize the child symbolizes the man’s own burden, and that the burden is that of a murder, and the murder of a blind man no less, I’m left feeling helpless, with more questions. The circumstances from his past are left unexplained, and it’s this inconclusive punch line that gives the unsettling effect that it does. The child is a mirror, a reflection of the man himself: who is he is, who he was, what he will become. His past, present, and future are symbolized by a child because it’s his own, an entity created by himself, related to and physically a part of himself, another extension of himself, by blood, something that will continue to live and grow.
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Post by Mina Kaneko on Sept 3, 2015 12:34:00 GMT
Discussion question: Do you trust the narrator? How does the ending of the story make you feel as a reader?
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Post by Teng Lai Chang on Sept 3, 2015 16:41:36 GMT
When reading novels, short stories, and even biographies, I always feel doubtful about the words of the narrators because they tend to exaggerate or exacerbate the contents of their stories. In addition, reading from one perspective of the story does not give the entirety of the story as every story is multifaceted with different perspectives evoking different thoughts and feelings from the viewers. There may be something missing or incomplete in the story due to authors' biases or their subconsciousness. So, I have my doubts with the narrator of "The Third Night." First of all, was he actually dreaming or was he already dead? Who was the child? Could the child actually be himself? Had he kill himself because he felt being blind was a burden that he couldn't carry on with his life? Was this a punishment by God or whomever to forever relive the terrible sin he had committed? The ending certainly brought me many of those aforementioned questions. The ending was surely upsetting and depressing as the child died from, what could possibly be a suicide (or maybe it was just murder), due to his inability to see. It is saddening to see how people view disabled people, even their own children, as a burden and less of a human, which was what happened with the child in the story: "...people tend to slight me. Which is bad. Even my parents slight me. Which is very bad (29)."
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Post by Mina Kaneko on Sept 3, 2015 21:57:14 GMT
I didn't consider the possibility of suicide, but I find that take fascinating. That's the nice thing about the story; it leaves open so many different interpretations by not being explicit in its meaning. If it were indeed a suicide, then the meaning of the burden and the blind man also change -- instead of the burden of having done harm unto others, it implies there was perhaps a darkness within himself that he could not live with, and that he, presently in a reincarnated form of self, is reflecting internally on who he was before he died, who is he after death (the effect of "the mirror" becomes much more internal).
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Post by Won Young Seo on Sept 4, 2015 2:03:01 GMT
What intrigues me is the fact that this murder apparently happened "100 years ago". Considering how Buddhism is big in Japanese, this brings up the possibility of rebirth and past lives, which might explain why the narrator seems to have no prior knowledge of the murder.
It's strange also that the child seems to be feeding the facts to the narrator and whatever the child tells the narrator becomes the truth to him. That being said, is the child a reliable source? The child claims to be the man who was killed but the child is blind, right? Even if the story is true, is the narrator really the murderer? How would the child know?
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