Nighttime Fires Essay Example

fire engine to capture his prey which gives him a revengeful sense of pleasure. The narrator compares the chase after the fire engines to a carnival. When they follow the fire engines, they “snaked like dragons” and “split the silent street. This word choice gives the impression of fire engines being sneaky and loud.

“It was festival, carnival. ” The author describes this event in a very interesting way. With all the noises and flickering lights, this could be as magical and exciting to a child as a festival.The father evidently holds the grudge against the wealthy, as his favorite thing to do is watching rich people’s houses burning down. He is jealous about their fancy houses and expensive Cadillacs.

The father “smiled a smile from a secret, brittle heart. Barecca’s use of “brittle” in describing his heart makes it sound dry, stale, and old, like a yellowed, cracked toenail. The father expresses excitement only while witnessing the destruction of someone else’s home and possessions. While he watches the destruction of someone’s life, “his face lit up” and he feels that something is finally “being set right”. It seems like he is looking for justice, so that all would be equal and fair in the world. The father’s relationship with the mother and his children does not appear to be a loving one.

He makes his wife do the work of getting the children up in the middle of the night, unconcerned about the sleep that children need or the fact that his wife does not share his love of watching nighttime fires. The mother does not look at the burning house; instead, she only watches

her husband. To the narrator, it is clear that “she was happy only when we were ready to go, when it was finally over and nothing else could burn. ” As for the children, he “never held” them, and only seemes to give them attention when he is excited about watching a fire.

On the drive home from a nighttime fire, the speaker “could see his quiet face in the rearview mirror, eyes like hallways filled with smoke. ” The eyes of the father are windows to the soul. In this case, his soul is empty, filled only with smoke. He is devoid of feeling, finding pleasure only in the suffering of other people. In reading “Nighttime Fires,” which takes place in Louisville, Kentucky, the reader is able to visualize how children are affected by difficult times that their parents go through. It was not easy for the father to accept what rich people had.

He was envious of their big houses and their expensive cars in the “curved driveways. ” He may have felt these luxuries were off limits to people in his class. His envy was like a cancer in the house that ate away at the flesh of everyone in the house, causing it to be dysfunctional. Barreca’s carefully chosen words in “Nighttime Fires” convey the character of the father vividly.

The images created in the poem give a clear idea of who this man was. The fact that this poem was written about memories from childhood make it especially powerful.