Literary Analysis: Nightfall' by Isaac Asimov

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Activity 1: Let Me Analyze It!

Directions: Think of your most favorite 21st century literary text. Write a literary analysis following the
given format/steps below. You may use an extra sheet for your answer.
LITERARY ANALYSIS: ‘NIGHTFALL’ BY ISAAC ASIMOV

You may imagine the earth shifting beneath your feet as you stumble out from beneath the 45-tonne bronze cone of
London's planetarium, shaky after a virtual adventure across the solar system and beyond. The National Maritime Museum, the
curve of the river, Canary Wharf, and the rest of the city stretch out beneath you as you stand on the brow of the hill in Greenwich
Park, your head still full of planets spinning on their computer-generated orbits, and the vista seems to roll inexorably east towards
the curtain of night. Darkness is an inescapable fact of life on earth, an astronomical certainty which, for all the terror it brings in
childhood, gives our daily existence its rise and fall, its ebb and flow, as night follows day follows night.
But what if it wasn't the case? What if night wasn't only dense and all-encompassing, but also unexpected and sudden?
What if daylight were so pervasive, so constant, that total darkness was unimaginable, inconceivable? What if there were no one to
teach us how not to be afraid of the dark?
In his 1941 short story "Nightfall", Isaac Asimov takes us to Lagash, a planet deep in a globular cluster surrounded by not
one, not two, not three – but six nearby stars. When Alpha sets, Beta is at zenith; when Gamma is at aphelion, Delta is nearby. The
whole planet is bathed in perpetual sunlight from its constant companions, so that the inhabitants of Saro City have never seen the
stars, have never known the total darkness of night. Until now.
"Nightfall" presents an alternate society for its own sake. It is obviously not an attempt to show what life will be like a few
years from now, so it is not tomorrow fiction. And though it contains a few satirical touches directed at commonly held
contemporary assumptions—for example, Beenay's notion that life as we know it could not exist on a planet revolving about a
single sun—still it does not attempt to make us feel in our guts that air pollution is evil or that violent hoodlums have a right to their
own identities. "Nightfall" is not a work of social fiction.
The characters in "Nightfall" have no visible resemblance to us. They don't exist on Earth's past or future, and they aren't the
remnants from a destroyed human colony. At the same time, we are given no reason to imagine them as anything other than
ourselves in our imaginations. They have brows and arms. Or, at the very least, Asimov employs the terminology developed to
describe humans to describe his aliens. Perhaps this is Asimov's application of Milton's "doctrine of accommodation," in which
Milton characterizes his angels—fallen and unfallen—as being shaped like us and collecting sense data like us, even though they
are not and do not. The angels are simply accommodated to human concepts by Milton. Although Asimov's aliens may be truly
strange, he has adapted them to our understanding of ourselves so that he can discuss them.
Fundamentally, though, it doesn't make any difference. "Nightfall" is about the relationship between consciousness and its
environment. The physical apparatus in which that consciousness is embodied is irrelevant. Human-shaped or alien-shaped, the
consciousnesses on Lagash are what they are because they developed under six suns and a nightfall that comes once every
2,049 years. Their mentality differs due to the fact that they live in various environments.
"Nightfall" makes such a strong impact because it persuades us that we would behave differently in those circumstances.
"Nightfall" symbolizes a cosmic concept: who we are and how we think are determined by the environment into which we are born
by chance. It creates an alternate planet and society for the sake of it. But that world isn't completely disconnected from our own. It
also has lessons for us to learn. Consciousness, regardless of the environment that shapes it, is sacred.
‘Nightfall" holds up extraordinarily well today, comparing the conflicts between intellectualism and superstition as civilization
fails to learn from its history. Indeed, the final line of the science fiction short story never fails to elicit a chill: “The long night had
come again.”
References:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_and_novel)
https://archive.org/stream/Astounding_v28n01_1941-09_SLiV#page/n8/mode/2up

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JUMPSTART

Activity 1: Let Me Analyze It!

LITERARY ANALYSIS: ‘NIGHTFALL’ BY ISAAC ASIMOV

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