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Last Night: the enhancing of the fear in the last night.

How would you feel when you are one of the jews that is waiting to be tormented? In Sebastian Faulks’s Last Night, the passage conveys a tense and oppressive atmosphere where jews are spending their one last night without tortures of the Nazis. Kids described by Faulk are mostly sleeping, spending their one last night in a dream full of peace and love, while adults were described as “slumped against wall.” The author was trying to bring up the fears of the jews before the departure towards the “hell” by using imagery, connotations and tone.

Adults are decadent and despair, wakened in their last night talking or being anxious. The adults’ actions are the way people usually see when watching disaster films, they are scared and suffering from anxiety. “Talking in lowered voice,” are what the author described the adults are. People often talk in lowered voice when they are uneasy with the situation and feeling insecure or just wanting to keep the volume down. In this situation described, the adults are feeling uncomfortable and uncertain about the departure to the concentration camp, while trying to not disturb the children in lovely dream.

As a huge contrast with the adults’ actions, the author used “somehow” to describe the children being asleep. The description of asleep children that aren’t uneasy with the departure indicates that the author thinks children are innocent in the war. “André was lying on the straw, the soft bloom of his cheek laid, uncaring, in the dung” (Faulk, 2). In this sentence, the blossom on Andre’s face perhaps represents the innocent jewish children and the dung is the horrible war that the “uncaring”children are stirred in with no reason. The children were sleeping in the deepest moments, while the adults are clear that the bus will depart after they ate the breakfast. The author is creating two exceeding positions of the children and adults—the children are enjoying their every last moment at their dreams before the departure, and the adults are worrying and feared on the last night. The two extreme positions of the people create a huge contrast of how they react to the thorny situation. The children’s sweet dreams symbolize how the author thinks that children shouldn’t be mixed with the war and should be playing in peacefulness.

The departure of the bus wasn’t described like a terrible and irreversible tragedy where every struggle seems useless, but the depart was described by Faulk more like a renounce that people aren’t hoping to escape or survive. The tone was plain and simple with no intentional descriptions, just like how people stopped mindless floundering and accept the truth. In line 40, the woman was trying to engrave her child’s appearance in her mind. People stopped struggling with the departure, and they realize that all they can do is to remember their families and friends. The memory may be a motivation to survive or a spiritual support at the trough.

The fear of the adults at first is obvious where they are anxious and awake, while the children prefer to “avoid” the problem by drifting into sleep. At the departure, the atmosphere of the text is dim and depressed. The children and the adults are in two worlds at the last night, one is heavenly and the other is hellish. The contrast between the children and the adults’ actions reinforce how children are innocent in the war and how people are pathetic and feeble.

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