The Graveyard Shift

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Introduction to Fiction The Graveyard Shift Night Woman was truly an inspirational story to me; it showed the innocence of a child as well as the care and love of a mother through hard work, sacrifice, dedication, and hope for a better future. Danticat uses poetic concepts to communicate ideas through imagery, symbol, and metaphor. This lyric style is very important for creating atmosphere. The setting of the story, is in a small shack in a one room house with mother and child separated by a curtain . When reading this story I got the feeling that although the mother was sleeping with all these men to make ends meet, she was also doing it to fill a void in her. Maybe it was the loving and belonging of a male figure in her life. "For a brief second, I almost mistake him for the ghost of his father, an older lover who disappeared with the night's shadows a long time ago. "The mother longs so much for that void to be filled that she makes up a story for he son if he should wake up. "Should my son wake up, I have prepared my fabrication...I will tell him that his father has come, that an angel brought him back from Heaven for a while." The reader is told that there are two kinds of women: night women (prostitutes) and day women (those who run a household in the typical sense and who operate by day).The narrator, a twenty-five-year-old prostitute, considers herself to be in between. While she does have sex for money with "suitors" who visit her, she is doing it because the deep love she has for her young son. Because they are poor, she lives and sleeps in the same one-room house with her son, and she is constantly fighting to protect her son from the reality of what she does. She has divided the room into two with sheer curtains. She makes sure her son sleeps with a radio and earphones on so any sounds of lovemaking do not disturb him I think the most
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