50 pages • 1 hour read
Carla TrujilloWhat Night Brings
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Sections 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Section 1 Summary
Marcía Cruz, who goes by Marci, is an 11-year-old girl living in San Lorenzo, California. Every night, she prays for God to make her father disappear. She does not ask God to kill her father because she believes a sin would prevent her from getting a second prayer. Instead, she hopes her father will run away with another woman.
Delia, Marci’s mother, married Eddie, Marci’s father, within two weeks of meeting him, and she is now a stay-at-home mother who “acts like she’s afraid to see anything for herself” (3). She is subservient to Eddie unless he’s looking at other women. She rebels by asking her aunt, Leti, to dye her hair.
Corin, Marci’s younger sister, acts unpredictably and sometimes causes Eddie to get violent. Marci compares Eddie to Leti’s dog, because he “walks around listening and looking for […] something that will probably make him mad” (4). Because smoking calms her father, Marci leaves cigarettes around the house for Eddie. When Delia finds one and mistakes it for an evil eye, she asks Leti to get rid of it with candles and herbs.
Section 2 Summary
Marci tells her mother and Leti that she is going to dye her hair blonde and change her name to become a movie star. When they laugh at her, Marci decides that she would rather be Supergirl than a movie star so she can save women from the men who hurt them. The woman she rescued would “be so happy I saved her, she’d want to marry me” (6).
Section 3 Summary
Marci and Corin wake up to find their father loading his rifle with shaking hands. Eddie threatens to kill himself, but Marci doesn’t believe he can because his arms are too short.
Eddie starts to yell out to God and his deceased father. Corin jokes that Eddie won’t make it into Heaven. Both girls laugh, but Marci is worried—not that Eddie will kill himself, but that he will turn the rifle on them: “Every time that rifle comes out he sticks in four bullets” (9).
The next morning, Marci’s parents act as if nothing happened. Delia prepares breakfast while Eddie changes the oil in the family car.
Sections 1-3 Analysis
Marci is a passive character, subordinate to her religion and her father. This complicated dynamic is clear as Marci prays for Eddie to leave. She believes that praying for his death is a sin and lessens the severity. Religion dictates her actions, leaving her vulnerable to Eddie. This illustrates an ongoing theme of a dominant savior who demands obedience. While Marci feels restricted by her religious faith, Eddie controls Delia. He saved her from an unhappy youth but allows her no independence. Corin is an independent female character, but her actions trigger Eddie’s violence.
Eddie’s suicide threat demonstrates his own obsession with lack of control. He cries out to God and his deceased father, two authority figures, while his body physically prevents him from taking his own life. However, by observing that “Every time that rifle comes out he sticks in four bullets” (9), Marci knows that, even when Eddie does not have control over himself, the rest of the family lives at his mercy.
