“Shocked and startled into utter banality”: Characters and Circumstance in The Watch That Ends the Night

"Shocked and startled into utter banality''I: Characters and Circumstance in The Watch That Ends the Night FRANCIS ZICHY In The Watch That Ends the Night, certainly Hugh MacLennan's most ambitious novel both in technique and in theme, the reader encounters a distinct novelistic method and a preoccupation with particular human questions. MacLennan has argued that his narrative method in this novel was an important innovation,2 and indeed it was a bold departure for a novelist with a preference for objective, historical narrative to write a novel fro~ the first person point of view. On the face of it, the first person narrative might offer a remedy for some of the difficulties of the previous novels which, while conceived around important ideas and situations, are often burdened by undigested information and externally applied analysis. The first person narrative gives an opportunity to explore from within the story the preoccupations which in MacLennan's previous practice so often seemed imposed from without. The Watch That Ends the Night promises a gain in intimacy and freedom of implication, because it places at the centre of the design, for the reader 's closer and freer scrutiny, that meditative presence which had always hovered around the edges of the earlier novels, but never let itself be brought directly into question. Thus in the opening pages of the novel the protagonist George Stewart speaks out for himself , as by virtue of the narrative method he must, and the reader starts to make inferences about his character and situation. We notice immediately George's special style of utterance, his rather solemn simplicity, a little after the manner of Hemingway: "it was five o'clock and the best time of my days that winter was about to begin."3 90 George's language is portentously simple and heartfelt, yet the effect of strong feeling aimed at is appreciably undercut by the awkward and calculated means used to achieve it. Judging George by his style and language, as the narrative method invites us to do, we find that he is a ponderous and insistent individual, with a love for stilted expression and a weakness for bathos: I love Montreal on a fine winter night and I was looking forward to the walk along Sherbrooke Street with the evening star in the gap at the corner of Guy, then to a drink before my fire, to dinner and after dinner to a quiet evening with my wife, a little more work and a good night's sleep. That evening I was happy. (Watch, 3) In the next paragraph we discover that George suffers from a disguised but tenacious form of self-importance. He is the small man, living in a provincial society, who has won a minor but real victory over himself and his circumstances: "in a huge country like the United States a man with a reputation such as I had here would have been prosperous. But Canada is a country with a small population, and the pay for my kind of work is proportionate....! had never known financial security. But at least I managed to get by and was not in debt" (Watch, 3). George evidently has a solemn pride in minor accomplishments . Because of his conscious humility he expresses his pride in a tendentious, inverted fashion: "I have never felt safe. Who of my age could, unless he was stupid?" (Watch, 3). The reader may at first be confused as to the implications of this emphatic, solemn rhetoric. Is George stressing the fact that he does not feel safe, or the fact that he is not stupid? Is he registering an anxiety, or swaggering? We begin to feel that the question of George's confidence or lack of it, so earnestly raised ·here, is a corn- · plicated one, more complicated perhaps than his manner of frank confession would suggest. When George goes on to explain and account for his insecurities, the turn of thought is disconcerting and difficult, because he moves from the indirect swaggering cited above to a distinctly ambiguous self-criticism, which hinges on an Revue d,etudes canadiennes Vol. 14, No. 4 (Hiver 1979-80 Winter) equally ambiguous praise of the...