The Great Season Diction

In the collection of short stories The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories written by Bruno Shultz in 1934 focuses on a group of short stories told from the perspective of a first person narrator and his life as the son of an owner shop and as a small town boy in Poland. Schultz uses diction and metaphor to show the motif of night in the stories “ A Night in July,” “The Night of the Great Season,” and “ Eddie” to demonstrate night’s chaos, power, eternity and ability to create confusion. Additionally, from the narrator’s perspective, night is a metaphor of the emotions perceived by the narrator throughout the story, such as confusion, loneliness, and admiration.
Schultz uses the narrator’s perspective to convey night’s power, eternity, and

During the story, the narrator awaits for the moment in which the people will come to his father’s store creating stress and a lot of tension to the father and the narrator, influencing the narrator’s perspective of night. For the narrator the moment that night comes is highly chaotic and powerful “The whole world suddenly began to wilt and blacken and exude an uncertain dusk which contaminated everything” (86), the diction use in the quote shows how night is slowly taking over everything, just like the stress and tension felt by the narrator and father grow throughout the story. In addition, the narrator describes night as a “plague of dusk spread, became black and rotten and scattered into dust. People fled before it in silent panic but the disease always caught up with them” (86). This quote illustrates the narrator’s choice to use the words “plague” and “disease” to describe night’s power that no one is inescapable, which mirrors the emotions of the narrator because with night comes what the narrator fears which is everyone coming to their store. Additionally, night’s ability to create confusion is seen when the people start walking to the store of the father like a “dense crowd sailed in darkness, in loud confusion, with the shuffle of a thousand feet, in the chatter of a thousand mouths- a disorderly,

The story focuses on a first-person narrator describing the life of his neighbor Eddie. When night comes the narrator uses a metaphor by comparing night to “Greedy ants swarm everywhere, decomposing into atoms the substance of things, eating them down to their white bones” (282). The metaphor use in the quote shows how the ants represent the night, its power and ability of taking over everything regardless of color or shape because not even the color “white” (282) can space the darkness of night. This illustrates the narrator’s feelings of admiration towards Eddie, connecting it to night’s power. Additionally, the narrator starts to struggle “to say whether one sees anything or whether these are illusion that begin their nightly ravings” illustrating his feelings of confusion when night comes and how now he is unable to say whether what he sees is as accurate as it was before night came, showing night’s ability to create confusion. In addition, the dynamic of the apartments changes with night because it goes from order to “A great disorderly, half-ironic conversations are conducted with constant misunderstandings in all chambers of human live” (283) which show how feeling of confusion spread through everyone’s life just like the darkness of night, portraying the emotion of confusion as