58 pages • 1 hour read
Tracy SierraNightwatching
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
The Mother
The unnamed mother is the story's protagonist, and the narrative follows her perspective through the close third person. As the embodiment of maternal instinct, the mother faces every parent’s worst nightmare when an intruder enters her home and threatens to harm her children. Though she is a small woman who has always considered herself to be physically and emotionally weak, she takes valiant and self-sacrificing action to save herself and her children from the threat. Interspersed with the minute-by-minute account of their travail are the mother’s memories of traumatic events in her childhood and young adulthood, all of which shape her personality and her responses to the current danger. As a single mother, she feels the weight of responsibility for her family's well-being, and this pressure is depicted through her agonized internal monologues, which highlight the burdens and expectations of her role as a caretaker. Her sense of duty is a central aspect of her character, and as the situation escalates, saving her children becomes her entire identity. Throughout the ordeal, she is consciously aware of the importance of remaining calm for the children, but she knows that they can sense her anxiety. Her thoughts reveal the tremendous mental strain, for she reflects, “You think you hide your fears from your children, but they absorb them like they absorbed your blood” (9). Though her initial reaction is to freeze and hide, she must eventually make the impossible choice to leave the children behind and search for help.
Once the mother finds help and the police rescue the children from the home, she collapses with relief, but her troubles have only just begun. When the police fail to find the intruder and go on to question the apparent inconsistencies in her story, they discount her experience and instead suspect that her mental health has deteriorated. As the investigation shifts from objective questioning to outright interrogation, the mother realizes that she is now fighting against an entire patriarchal system polluted with misogyny and determined to disbelieve her just because she is a woman. Her flashbacks reveal that this is not the first time she’s experienced misogynistic behavior, as her husband repeatedly dismissed her intuitions as irrational. Similarly, her father-in-law emotionally and physically abused her, and after half a lifetime of succumbing to abuse and making herself small to placate male egos, she finally chooses to fight. Refusing to back down from her story, she uses determination and resourcefulness to prove her innocence, neutralize the intruder, and reunite with her children.
The mother therefore stands as an example of the power of a mother’s love and fierce female energy that refuses to be ignored. The mother emerges more resilient after the ordeal, but she recognizes that she and the children will never be the same. As the narrative states, “[S] was full of broken pieces that had mended even if they’d knit together at odd angles. […] Unlike the old saying, her broken places hadn’t healed stronger. But so far they had always come together enough to allow her to function” (189). The mother ultimately symbolizes maternal devotion, and her experiences draw attention to the challenges that women face while safeguarding themselves and their families. Through the intense interiority of the story, the author conveys the mother’s emotional journey and burdensome isolation, creating a sense of empathy for people who must raise their children alone.
The Corner
The Corner is the name that the mother and the children give to the intruder, and he is the primary antagonist in the story. Although the story reveals little about his character or background, he represents pure evil as he enters their home with the intent to harm the children. At first, the mother questions whether he is real and considers that he may be part of a lucid nightmare. She describes his unsettling nature, stating, “His presence had the distantly familiar rancidness of something wrong and rotten she’d tasted before but couldn’t quite place” (3). As she recalls meeting this man a few months earlier and bridling at his inappropriate behavior towards her daughter, the mother’s fear and anxiety increase, and she realizes that she knows what this man is after.
As quietly as he arrives, he vanishes just as the police arrive. Though he audibly threatens the mother and children with promises to kill them like animals, the police and the protagonist’s abusive father-in-law try to convince the children that the Corner is a hallucination, questioning the mother’s mental health. Their skepticism amplifies the threat because the intruder is still at large, and the mother is now separated from her children. The Corner’s complete depravity is revealed when the mother finds footage on the game camera of him stalking their home for months. In the novel’s climactic scene, she bravely faces off with him and shoots him with her husband’s gun, paralyzing him from the neck down. Because the police later connect him to an array of murders and disappearances, her bravery not only saves her family but also stops his murderous spree, saving countless others and bringing justice to the victims. However, even though he can never harm her family again, the mother bears the physical and emotional scars of the trauma induced by his crime.
The Husband
Traditionally, husbands are cast as their family's protectors and emotional anchors, and the author plays on this conventional perception by making it clear from the very beginning that the protagonist’s husband—and therefore his protection—is absent. This fact immediately increases the tension and anxiety of the narrative as the mother realizes that there is an invader in their home and it is now incumbent upon her to be both the caretaker and the protector. Being alone in the house heightens the mother’s vulnerability as she realizes that she is no physical match for the intruder. Her husband’s gun is locked in a safe, and her cell phone is out of reach. As her ordeal intensifies, her husband's absence takes on an ironic presence of its own, and as the mother relies on her gift of strategic planning and calculated decision-making to manage the situation, she nonetheless finds herself plagued by doubt as she wonders what her husband would say about each split-second decision.
Flashbacks later reveal the complexities of the mother’s marriage, for she initially saw her union with him as a way to recover what she had lost in her childhood. As the narrative states, “When her husband (then boyfriend) introduced her to his parents [in the] senior year of college, a fluttering hope pounded her heart. A real family. Mother, father, child” (36). However, ongoing conflicts with her abusive father-in-law began almost immediately, and she perceived that her husband lacked the courage to stand up to his father and shared many of his biases. The flashbacks therefore reveal that the husband became hypercritical of the mother’s meek introversion, and his derisive attitude negatively impacted her self-esteem. Her mother-in-law’s death marked a shift in their marriage as the mother sacrificed time with her children to care for the dying woman and endured constant verbal abuse from her father-in-law even as her husband failed to provide her with any support or defense. When her father-in-law slapped her, the husband was angry but still didn’t fully support her, even going so far as to suggest that she provoked the behavior and therefore deserved it.
In the present, his disapproving voice rings in her mind as she second-guesses each decision. Years of acceding to his derisive comments about her overreactions to preserve their marriage have made her passive and doubtful of her strength. Even so, she retains tender memories of him, especially given how deeply he loved the children. The revelation of the husband’s death a few months prior provides new insight into the mother’s isolation and the reasons for her depleted physical and emotional state. Coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, the mother is genuinely alone, and she must navigate the trauma of loss and existential threats without a support system. Though the husband is absent from the story, his lingering presence permeates the narrative as the pain of his words and actions continues to affect the mother. Ultimately, she chooses to break the cycle of passivity and weaponizes her autonomy, acting decisively to save herself and her family and proving that women do not need men to save them.
The Father-in-Law
The mother’s father-in-law never appears in the story except in the mother’s memories and through phone calls with the police. However, his toxic, abusive energy provides another source of tension in the mother’s life as she fights to keep her family safe and intact. From the moment the mother begins dating her husband, his father becomes verbally abusive towards her, making insensitive comments about her skin condition. He intensifies his cruelty when his son embarks on a career that he disapproves of. When he perceives that his grandson is overly sensitive, he criticizes the boy and tells him to toughen up. Most notably, he physically assaults the mother after his wife’s death. The sting of his cruelty remains long after the incident, and the trauma of his abuse resurfaces when she fights for her family’s lives, hidden inside the home. Recalling his slap, she “rub[s] her cheek, feeling the ghost of her father-in-law’s long, thin hand” (72). When the police send her children to stay with the father-in-law, the mother feels no safer and worries that he is purposely trying to separate her from them. Her fight evolves from trying to keep her children safe from an intruder to proving her innocence and protecting them from an unsafe family member. Although the mother calls the Corner a monster, the father-in-law’s character proves that men who commit metaphorically “monstrous” acts can exist anywhere.
The Sergeant
Law enforcement agencies have historically been dominated by men, and such institutions often have built-in biases that devalue women's testimonies and experiences. Sierra's portrayal of the police sergeant underscores the limitations of law enforcement and the systemic issues of bureaucracy, corruption, and embedded misogyny. In their first encounter after her husband dies, the sergeant is empathetic to the mother’s plight, but when he begins to investigate her claim of an intruder, he allows his preexisting beliefs to cloud his judgment, and he callously dismisses her account out of hand. Having already decided that she has a mental illness, he doubts her story from the beginning and even suspects her of harming her own children. After several perceived inconsistencies in her story arise, the sergeant actively gaslights the mother, questioning the veracity of her statement and causing her to feel anxious and confused. The gaslighting moves into full-blown victim blaming when he suggests that she has invented the entire scenario to get attention. He leverages his power against her devotion to her children, urging her to accept his version of the story and to comply with the police investigation so that she can be reunited with her children. Preying upon her emotional and physical vulnerability, the sergeant further undermines the mother’s trust in men and the justice system. Instead of symbolizing fairness, justice, and safety, the sergeant mishandles the case, and his misogynistic attitude reflects the author’s critique of the inherent flaws in law enforcement systems.
