Back to Sleep (Claire)

I did some rereadings of Sleep and then skimmed the Gitta Hansen piece, where one line from the analysis really stuck out to me: “although she is aware of her own entrapment, watashi realizes she is unable to escape, and the story concludes abruptly with watashi locked inside her car as two male shadows shadows surround the doors.”

When I read this passage, it connected the two men outside the car as the two people guarding her from escaping her entrapment and made me think of other two major characters in the story, her husband and son. What if the ending of the story isn’t meant to be read as another chapter in the story, but rather as the epilogue, where the narrator accepts that she can’t escape from her life as her husband and son force her to remain in her staid role as a wife/mother? 

Hansen cites another scholar who had a similar idea, Kato Norihiro, who is mentioned in the second paragraph of page 106. However, because I was not able to find his publication that Hansen cites, I looked for the evidence on my own.

First, it seems obvious that she would be able to recognize her husband and son as her attackers. But the narrator admits that has trouble recalling what her husband’s face looks like. When trying to draw his face from memory, she “d[oes]n’t remember anything about his face” and describes the experience as “running into an invisible wall” (78). She also has trouble remembering what his face earlier on in the marriage, where she “trie[s], but c[an’t] do it” (103). Her thoughts on her son’s face follows a similar vein, where she observes him while he’s asleep and notes that his “face looks exactly like her husband’s,” but she also describes him as a “stranger” (104, 105). Additionally, the Kato citation reveals that one of the shadows is big while the other is small (big=husband, small=son), a detail left out in the official English translation.

Not being able to recognize them or describing them as strangers (on the metaphorical level) would explain why the narrator is unable to recognize the two of them as they rock her car, both on a physical and figurative level. The physical part is obvious, but on the figurative level, not being able to recognize either of them may also allude to the narrator not understanding them. Because they are so distant to her, she doesn’t recognize how her husband and son are one keeping her trapped in her daily life. The narrator also mentions that her family doesn’t understand her or her thoughts, suggesting that her family is unintentionally keeping her stuck in her boring life(103).

I also found the fact that the shadows attack her car to be compelling. The car is a symbol of freedom; it’s the means by which she is able to get away from her house and go to distant places. It’s also something she views as specifically only belonging to her, emphasizing “it’s mine” and that she doesn’t share it with her husband (79). Her husband and son are destroying her car so that she cannot, quite literally, ‘escape’ her life, but are also destroying one of the only things she sees as belonging to her. This destruction of her belongings suggests a denigration of her individuality, something the narrator has recently tried to take back by not sleeping.

Lastly, for my thoughts on why this is an epilogue and not another chapter lies in the shifting of tenses after the line break. The first 32 pages of the story are told in the past tense, but after the line break, which opens with the narrator getting ready to drive to the harbor, the final three pages are written all in the present tense. While she’s concluding the story with another event, she keeps it in the present tense because it represents the daily struggle she has with retaining her newfound individuality in spite of her entrapment. In this way, the narrator both concludes the story and summarizes her daily life after she ‘wakes up’ and reclaims her sense of individuality.