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

ability to create confusion by using metaphor and diction in “A Night in July.” During the story, the narrator finds himself wandering through the night after feeling unwelcome in his own home, which makes him feel lonely throughout the story, impacting the way he perceives the world. The narrator walks through the picturesque night, which he distinguishes as being full of “scraps of conversations left by nightly wanderers hang in the air … and skeins of whispers undispersed by the breeze of night unfold” (208). Illustrating the emotion of the narrator through the “scraps of conversations” (208). Because he feels alone at night and there is no other life around him but what is left after daytime, just like the narrator has no one to share what he sees or feels. Additionally, the use of words, like “labyrinths”(208) and “hallucination” (208) to describe night, emphasize how the narrator feels confused at night. To him, night is nothing more than an illusion that creates confusion and is impossible to escape from just like the feeling of loneliness that he feels throughout the story. Furthermore, the narrator admits that there is a point to nighttime in which “the night gives up its game removes its veil, discloses its serious eternal face” (208), the use of metaphor and words such as “eternal” show how for the narrator night is eternal and powerful, which shows how his state of loneliness influence his views of night because he feels confused and taken over by the power of night. In addition, the narrator starts questioning whether he “will forever wade through the black morasses and quagmires of the endless night” (207), reinforcing the eternal quality of night and the confusion it created for the narrator because he does not know “How many years will his lonely wandering last” (207) showing once again how his loneliness connects to his description of night. Therefore, the complexity of the narrator’s loneliness throughout the story influences the way he portrays night and how he perceives everything that is going on around him, which makes the description of night bias and not accurate.
Schultz uses diction and metaphor in “ The Night of the Great Season” to describe the narrator’s perspective on night’s chaos, and its ability to create confusion.

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,

entangled migration” (87), which shows night’s confusion heightens with the narrator’s emotions because the people are walking to his father’s store, which creates a lot of tension and confusion for the narrator and the people around him. Therefore, the emotions of the narrator influence night’s description and the impact it has on the people.
Schultz uses diction and metaphor in the story of “Eddie” to show night’s power, how it creates confusion and mirrors the narrator’s emotions of admiration and curiosity towards Eddie’s life.

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

all powerful and inescapable just like night. Additionally, the use of diction in the quote emphasizes the narrator’s confusion about what is truly going on in the life of Eddie after the night comes because everything becomes a big misunderstanding between what people understand and what is being said. Therefore, the reader learns the narrator’s perception of the world and his emotions through the motif of night.
The motif of night is described in the three stories selected from The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories by Bruno Schultz from the narrator’s perspective, which leads to the night’s description being affected by the narrator’s emotions of loneliness, tension, and confusion. This leads to night having a constant negative connotation throughout the short stories such as “disease”. In addition, the narrator’s emotions influence the motif of night as powerful, endless and inescapable. Therefore, the narrator’s emotions throughout the story influence the motif of night and its perception