Discussion Forum for Short Stories: Barth and Woolf
Select one of this week’s readings, and write a response where you discuss how form contributes to your interpretation of the story. You must cite the lines that you are discussing in your response.
- I expect for this response to have complete sentences, correct grammar, and no spelling/typing mistakes.
- Your posting should be well-written, critical, and thoughtful.
- I would strongly recommend you to write the response in Word first, review and edit it, and then copy it into the Canvas window.
- You are required to gi
Night-Sea Journey
By John Barth
“One way or another, no matter which theory of our journey is correct, it’s myself I address; to
whom I rehearse as to a stranger our history and condition, and will disclose my secret hope
though I sink for it.
“Is the journey my invention? Do the night, the sea, exist at all, I ask myself, apart from my
experience of them? Do I myself exist, or is this a dream? Sometimes I wonder. And if I am, who
am I? The Heritage I supposedly transport? But how can I be both vessel and contents? Such are
the questions that beset my intervals of rest.
“My trouble is, I lack conviction. Many accounts of our situation seem plausible to me- where
and what we are, why we swim and whither. But implausible ones as well, perhaps especially
those, I must admit as possibly correct. Even likely. If at times, in certain humors- striking in
unison, say, with my neighbors and chanting with them ‘Onward! Upward!’- I have supposed that
we have ever after all a common Maker, Whose nature and motives we may not know, but Who
engendered us in some mysterious wise and launched us forth toward some end known but to
Him- if (for a moodslength only) I have been able to entertain such notions, very popular in
certain quarters, it is because our night-sea journey partakes of their absurdity. One might even
say: I can believe them because they are absurd.
“Has that been said before?
“Another paradox: it appears to be these recesses from swimming that sustain me in the swim.
Two measures onward and upward, flailing with the rest, then I float exhausted and dispirited,
borood upon the night, the sea, the journey, while the flood bears me a measure back and down:
slow progress, but I live, I live, and make my way, aye, past many a drowned comrade in the
end, stronger, worthier than I, victims of their unremitting joie de nager. I have seen the best
swimmers of my generation go under. Numberless the number of the dead! Thousands drown as
I think this thought, millions as I rest before returning to the swim. And scores, hundreds of
millions have expired since we surged forth, brave in our innocence, upon our dreadful way.
‘Love! Love!’ we sang then, a quarter-billion strong, and churned the warm sea white with joy of
swimming! Now all are gone down- the buoyant, the sodden, leaders and followers, all gone
under, while wretched I swim on. Yet these same reflective intervals that keep me afloat have led
me into wonder, doubt, despair- strange emotions for a swimming!- have led me, even, to
suspect . . . that our night-sea journey is without meaning.
“Indeed, if I have yet to join the hosts of the suicides, it is because (fatigue apart) I find it no
meaningfuller to drown myself than to go on swimming “I know that there are those who seem actually to enjoy the night-sea; who claim to love
swimming for its own sake, or sincerely believe that ‘reaching the Shore,’ ‘transmitting the
Heritage’ (Whose Heritage, I’d like to know? And to whom?)is worth the staggering cost. I do
not. Swimming itself I find at best not actively unpleasant, more often tiresome, not infrequently
a torment. Arguments from function and design don’t impress me: granted that we can and do
swim, that in a manner of speaking our long tails and streamlined heads are ‘meant for’
swimming; it by no means follows- for me, at least- that we should swim, or otherwise endeavor
to ‘fulfill our destiny.’ Which is to say, Someone Else’s destiny, since ours, so far as I can see, is
merely to perish, one way or another, soon or late. The heartless zeal of our (departed) leaders,
like the blind ambition and good cheer of my own youth, appalls me now; for the death of my
comrades I am inconsolable. If the night-sea journey has justification, it is not for us swimmers
to discover it.
“Oh, to be sure, ‘Love!’ one heard on every side: ‘Love it is that drives and sustains us!’ I
translate: we don’t know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and,
imperfectly, sustained. Love is how we call our ignorance of what whips us. ‘To reach the Shore,’
then: but what if the Shore exists in the fancies of us swimmers merely, who dream it to account
for the dreadful fact that we swim, have always and only swum, and continue swimming without
respite (myself excepted) until we die? Supposing even that there were a Shore- that, as a cynical
companion of mine once imagined, we rise from the drowned to discover all those vulgar
superstitions and exalted metaphors to be literal truth: the giant Maker of us all, the Shores of
Light beyond our night-sea journey! -whatever would a swimmer do there? The fact is, when we
imagine the Shore, what comes to mind is just the opposite of our condition: no more night, no
more sea, no more journeying. In short, the blissful estate of the drowned.
” ‘Ours not to stop and think; ours but to swim and sink….’ Because a moment’s thought reveals
the pointlessness of swimming. ‘No matter,’ I’ve heard some say, even as they gulped their last:
‘The night-sea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood,
onward and upward, toward a Shore that may not exist and couldn’t be reached if it did.’ The
thoughtful swimmer’s choices, then, they say, are two: give over thrashing and go under for
good, or embrace the absurdity; affirm in and for itself the night-sea journey; swim on with
neither motive nor destination, for the sake of swimming, and compassionate moreover with
your fellow swimmer, we being all at sea and equally in the dark. I find neither course
acceptable. If not even theh hypothetical Shore can justify a sea-full of drowned comrades, to
speak of the swim-in-itself as somehow doing so strikes me as obscene. I continue to swim- but
only because blind habit, blind instinct, blind fear of drowning are still more strong than the
horror of our journey. And if on occasion I have assisted a fellow-thrasher, joined in the cheers
and songs, even passed along to others strokes of genius from the drowned great, it’s that I shrink
by temperament from making myself conspicuous. To paddle off in one’s own direction, assert
one’s independent right-of-way, overrun one’s fellows without compunction, or dedicate oneself
entirely to pleasures and diversions without regard for conscience- I can’t finally condemn those who journey in this wise; in half my moods I envy them and despise the weak vitality that keeps
me from following their example. But in reasonabler moments I remind myself that it’s their very
freedom and self-responsibility I reject, as more dramatically absurd, in our sensless
circumstances, than tailing along in conventional fashion. Suicides, rebels, affirmers of the
paradox- nay-sayers and yea-sayers alike to our fatal journey- I finally shake my head at them.
And splash sighing past their corpses, one by one, as past a hundred sorts of others: frfiends,
enemies, brothers; fools, sages, brutes- and nobodies, million upon million. I envy them all.
“A poor irony: that I, who find abhorrent and tautological the doctrine of survival of the fittest
(fitness meaning, in my experience, nothing more than survival-ability, a talent whose only
demonstration is the fact of survival, but whose chief ingredients seem to be strength, guile,
callousness), may be the sole remaining swimmer! But the doctrine is false as well as repellent:
Chance drowns the worthy with the unworthy, bears up the unfit with the fit by whatever
definition, and makes the night-sea journey essentially haphazard as well as murderous and
unjustified.
“‘You only swim once.’ Why bother, then?
“‘Except ye drown, ye shall not reach the Shore of Light.’ Poppycock.
“One of my late companions- that same cynic with the curious fancy, among the first to drown-
entertained us with odd conjectures while we waited to begin our journey. A favorite theory of
his was that the Father does exist, and did indeed make us and the sea we swim- but not a-
purpose or even consciously; He made us, as it were, despite Himself, as we make waves with
every tail-thrash, and may be unaware of our existence. Another was that He knows we’re here
but doesn’t care what happens to us, inasmuch as He creates (voluntarily or not) other seas and
swimmers at more or less regular intervals. In bitterer moments, such as just before he drowned,
my friend even supposed that our Maker wished us unmade; there was indeed a Shore, he’d
argue, which could save at least some of us from drowning and toward which it was our function
to struggle- but for reasons unknowable to us He wanted desperately to prevent our reaching that
happy place and fulfilling our destiny. Our ‘Father,’ in short, was our adversary and would-be
killer! No less outrageous, and offensive to traditional opinion, were the fellow’s speculations on
the nature of our Maker: that He might well be no swimmer Himself at all, but some sort of
monstrosity, perhaps even tailless; that He might be stupid, malicious, insensible, perverse, or
asleep and dreaming; that the end for which He created and launched us forth, and which we
flagellate ourselves to fathom, was perhaps immoral, even obscene. Et cetera, et cetera: there was
no end to the chap’s conjectures, or the impoliteness of his fancy; I have reason to suspect that
his early demise, whether planned by ‘our Maker’ or not, was expedited by certain fellow-
swimmers indignant at his blasphemies.
“In other moods, however (he was as given to moods as I), his theorizing would become half-
serious, so it seemed to me, especially upon the subjects of Fate and Immortality, to which our youthful conversations often turned. Then his harangues, if no less fantastical, grew solemn and
obscure, and if he was still baiting us, his passion undid the joke. His objection to popular
opinions of the hereafter, he would declare, was their claim to general validity. Why need
believers hold that all the drowned rise to be judged at journey’s end, and non-believers that
drowning is final without exception? In his opinion (so he’d vow at least), nearly everyone’s fate
was permanent death; indeed he took a sour pleasure in supposing that every ‘Maker’ made
thousands of separate seas in His creative lifetime, each populated like ours with millions of
swimmers, and that in almost every instance both sea and swimmers were utterly annihilated,
whether accidentally or by malevolent design. (Nothing if not pluralistical, he imagined there
might be millions and billions of ‘Fathers,’ perhaps in some ‘night-sea’ of their own!) However-
and here he turned infidels against him with the faithful- he professed to believe that in possibly
a single night-sea per thousand, say, one of its quarter-billion swimmers (that is, one swimmer in
two hundred fifty billions) achieved a qualified immortality. In some cases the rate might be
slightly higher; in others it was vastly lower, for just as there are swimmers of every degree of
proficiency, including some who drown before the journey starts, unable to swim at all, and
others created drowned, as it were, so he imagined what can only be termed impotent Creators,
Makers unable to Make, as well as uncommonly fertile ones and all grades between. And it
pleased him to deny anay necessary relation between a Maker’s productivity and His other
virtues- including, even, the quality of His creatures.
“I could go on (he surely did) with his elaboration of these mad notions- such as that swimmers
in other night-seas needn’t be of our kind; that Makers themselves might belong to different
species, so to speak; that our particular Maker mightn’t Himself be immortal, or that we might be
not only His emmissaries but His ‘immortality,’ continuing His life and our own, transmogrified,
beyond our individual deaths. Even this modified immortality (meaningless to me) he conceived
as relative and contingent, subject to accident or deliberate termination: his pet hypothesis was
that Makers and swimmers each generate the other- against all odds, their number being so great-
and that any given ‘immortality-chain’ could terminate after any number of cycles, so that what
was ‘immortal’ (still speaking relatively) was only the cyclic process of incarnation, which itself
might have a beginning and an end. Alternatively he liked to imagine cycles within cycles, either
finite or infinite: for example, the ‘night-sea,’ as it were, in which Makers ‘swam’ and created
night-seas and swimmers like ourselves, might be the creation of a larger Maker, Himself one of
many, Who in turn et cetera. Time itself he regarded as relative to our experience, like
magnitude: who knew but what, with each thrash of our tails, minuscule seas and swimmers,
whole eternities, came to pass- as ours, perhaps, and our Maker’s Maker’s, was elapsing between
the strokes of some supertail, in a slower order of time?
“Naturally I hooted with the others at this nonsense. We were young then, and had only the
dimmest notion of what lay ahead; in our ignorance we imagined night-sea journeying to be a
positively heroic enterprise. Its meaning and value we never questioned; to be sure, some must
go down by the way, a pity no doubt, but to win a race requires that others lose, and like all my fellows I took for granted that I would be the winner. We milled and swarmed, impatient to be
off, never mind where or why, only to try our youth against the realities of night and sea; if we
indulged the skeptic at all, it was as a droll, half-contempible mascot. When he died in the initial
slaughter, no one cared.
“And even now I don’t subscribe to all his views- but I no longer scoff. The horror of our history
has purged me of opinions, as of vanity, confidence, spirit, charity, hope, vitality, everything-
except dull dread and a kind of melancholy, stunned persistence. What leads me to recall his
fancies is my g rowing suspicion that I, of all swimmers, may be the sole survivor of this fell
journey, tale-bearer of a generation. This suspicion, together with the recent sea-change, suggests
to me now that nothing is impossible, not even my late companion’s wildest visions, and brings
me to a certain desperate resolve, the point of my chronicling.
“Very likely I have lost my senses. The carnage at our setting out; our decimation by whirlpool,
poisoned cataract, sea-convulsion; the panic stampedes, mutinies, slaughters, mass suicides; the
mounting evidence that none will survive the journey- add to these anguish and fatigue; it were a
miracle if sanity stayed afloat. Thus I admit, with the other possibilities, that the present
sweetening and calming of the sea, and what seems to be a kind of vasty presence, song, or
summons from the near upstream, may be hallucinations of disordered sensibility….
“Perhaps, even, I am drowned already. Surely I was never meant for the rough-and-tumble of the
swim; not impossibly I perished at the outset and have only imaged the night-sea journey from
some final deep. In any case, I’m no longer young, and it is we spent old swimmers, disabused of
every illusion, who are most vulnerable to dreams.
“Sometimes I think I am my drowned friend.
“Out with it: I’ve begun to believe, not only that She exists, but that She lies not far ahead, and
stills the sea, and draws me Herward! Aghast, I recollect his maddest notion: that our destination
(which existed, mind, in but one night-sea out of hundreds and thousands) was no Shore, as
commonly conceived, but a mysterious being, indescribable except by paradox and vaguest
figure: wholly different from us swimmers, yet our complement; the death of us, yet our
salvation and resurrection; simultaneously our journey’s end, mid-point, and commencement; not
membered and thrashing like us, but a motionless or hugely gliding sphere of unimaginable
dimentsion; self-contained, yet dependent absolutely, in some wise, upon the chance (always
monstrously improbable) that one of us will survive the night-sea journey and reach…Her! Her,
he called it, or She, which is to say, Other-than-a-he. I shake my head; the thing is too
preposterous; it is myself I talk to, to keep my reason in this awful darkness. There is no She!
There is no You! I rave to myself; it’s Death alone that hears and summons. To the drowned, all
seas are calm….
“Listen: my friend maintained that in every order of creation there are two sorts of creators,
contrary yet complementary, one of which gives rise to seas and swimmers, the other to the Night-which-contains-the-sea and to What-waits-at-the-journey’s-end: the former, in short, to
destiny, the latter to destination (and both profligately, involuntarily, perhaps indifferently or
unwittingly). The ‘purpose’ of the night-sea journey- but not necessarily of the journeyer or of
either Maker! -my friend could describe only in abstractions: consummation, transfiguration,
union of contraries, trancension of categories. When we laughed, he would shrug and admit that
he understood the business no better than we, and thought it ridiculous, dreary, possibly obscene.
‘But one of you,’ he’d add with his wry smile, ‘may be the Hero destined to complete the night-
sea journey and be one with Her. Chances are, of course, you won’t make it’ He himself, he
declared, was not even going to try; the whole idea repelled him; if we chose to dismiss it as an… [Content truncated to 3000 words]