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The Third Night Analysis

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The Third Night is part of a collection of essays in Natsume Soschi’s Ten Nights’ Dream. In a literal interpretation, this essay is about a dreamer walking at dusk with a six-year-old child on his back. He believes the child is his own and he knows that the child is blind and has a shaved head. He does not know when the child lost its sight or why its head is shaved. Despite its blindness, the child seems to know where they are and where they are going. Its voice is childlike, but its words are mature. The dreamer grows fearful and he decides to abandon the child in the woods. As they enter the woods, the child directs the dreamer to the base of a cedar tree where he states that he was killed by the dreamer, in this very place a hundred years ago. The child then seems to grow heavy as stone.
The writer’s use of words and imagery conjures up a surreal and dreamlike atmosphere, which at times, seems to over- shadow the plot. The issues explored in this story can be themed by guilt (“And when I realized for the first time that I was a murderer…) and fear (“I began to feel afraid of him even though …show more content…

While reading this short story about his third dream, you get the sense that this could only happen in a dream because of it spooky image and weirdness. An example of the symbolism used can be seen in the use of the blind boy as a way to project the burden of the past or a reminder of this character’s past. Some metaphors can be found in the lines, “They were scarlet like the stomach of a newt” as well as “The boy stuck to my back was reflecting, like a mirror…” Imagery abounds in the ways you can visualize in your mind how creepy the scene would look like as in this section of text, “I kept walking, aiming wordlessly at the woods. The path kept winding through the fields, so it was difficult to get

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