‘We Are Nighttime Travelers’ by Ethan Canin

We Are Nighttime Travelers by Ethan Canin, 1988

The magic trick:

A great self-consciously styled literary device

This is the story of an aging married couple who no longer feels connected by love. At least that’s the story we get from the husband’s perspective. In it, the wife reports being awoken in the middle of the night to find a strange figure at her bedroom window. The husband was elsewhere at the time, trying to write fiction? Sleeping in a different room?

Anyway, it happens a few more times throughout the story, but, tellingly, it doesn’t ever become the main plot of the story. The wife, yes, is concerned. The husband, yes, listens to her concerns. But neither react in any kind of realistically panicked way.

This non-reaction reaction points the reader toward what really is a pretty interesting reading experience when you think about it. We receive this knowing nod toward slightly-non-realism by the author as a signal to see this figure in the window not purely as a plot device but as a literary device. Ah, we say, I see! You want us to analyze this!

Is this a suggestion that the husband is trying to connect, trying to know his wife again? Is this a suggestion that in the absence of marital connection, terrors are lining up in the night to take over the house? Or is this a suggestion that the husband is stuck on the outside looking in of his own life?

It’s a great self-consciously styled literary device.

And that’s quite a trick on Canin’s part.

The selection:

“You heard him?”

“Yes.”

“The front window?”

She got up and went to the sink. This is a trick of hers. At that distance I can’t see her face.

“The front window is ten feet off the ground,” I said.

“What I know is that there was a man out there last night, right outside the glass.” She walked out of the kitchen.

“Let’s check,” I called after her. I walked into the living room, and when I got there she was looking out the window.

“What is it?”

She was peering out at an angle. All I could see was snow, blue-white.