The Night Came Slowly

The night is a key player in this short piece, as evidenced by the work’s title: “The Night Came Slowly.” The night is an important symbol in this work (see Symbols/Motifs). In addition, through personification, Chopin presents the night as a character.

The night, specifically “the Summer night” (Paragraph 1), is the focus of the narrator’s interest at the start of the short piece. Unlike man, the night can communicate in a way that does not cause the narrator to suffer. The night is something of an ambassador of nature: both an extension of nature, encompassing many of nature’s aspects, and perhaps the most self-aware entity of nature in the work.

The presence of the night influences the narrator’s perspective, altering the entire landscape and transforming, or perhaps reducing, other humans into “intangible things” (Paragraph 4). The narrator explicitly states that the night “means mystery” (Paragraph 3), and the night does appear to have otherworldly properties that allow it to affect the narrator. The narrator refers to the night as a “necromancer” (Paragraph 6), one with “soothing and penetrating charm” (Paragraph 4). The night is both soothing and seductive, drawing the narrator into it and highlighting The Allure of Gentleness.

The “Bible Class” man represents The Ugliness of Man’s Hubris, serving as a point of contrast to highlight the gentleness and grace of nature. This Bible teacher does not appear until the end of the short piece, but his arrival—or at least the narrator’s memory of him—is enough to break the narrator of their reverie.

The narrator shows overt disdain toward the Bible teacher. This man is “detestable” (Paragraph 6). His physical features reflect the noise he makes and his apparent sense of self-importance: “red cheeks and bold eyes” (Paragraph 6). The Bible teacher, with his “coarse manner and speech” (Paragraph 6), also communicates in a way that calls back to the narrator’s initial observation that man and books make them suffer. Chopin places “Bible Class” in quotation marks to further augment the narrator’s belief that this man’s course, in fact, has nothing to offer. The narrator’s concluding thought about this character is that he is “a young fool who was born yesterday and will die tomorrow” (Paragraph 6). This man, despite his pride, has nothing to offer the narrator, especially not in comparison to the light in the sky. 

The Bible teacher serves as a foil to nature, the brief lines of description about him capturing how starkly man—or at least “fools” like him (Paragraph 6)—contrast with the “solemn” (Paragraph 3) self-possession of the night and nature by extension. In this sense, the Bible teacher could be considered through both an environmentalist lens and a feminist lens as representing the harm that man’s pride does to what is truly great, mysterious, and soothing.