Good Night, Irene

“If you get to come home, you will be so grateful you won’t realize at first that you survived. But once you know you survived, you’ll only be starting to understand.”

The soldier on the train tries to warn Irene about the terrible effects of war, and the survivor’s guilt that comes afterward. Although Irene does not yet understand what the soldier tries to tell her, this quote foreshadows the guilt that Irene experiences at the end of the novel when she returns home.

“She was so filled with rage. Her father. The farm. Her mother. Donny. She needed an escape, a valve to release her helpless anger. She needed to take some action. She decided to go to war.”

Dorothy’s internal conflict is born of the pent-up rage and helplessness that she feels over the deaths of her family members. Rather than facing her anger and grief directly, however, Dorothy chooses to constantly move toward action because it gives her a sense of purpose amidst the randomness of death.

“She wasn’t going to the war only for men to tell her what to do.”

This quote exemplifies Dorothy’s attitude in the war. Although she wants to help the men overseas, Dorothy knows her own worth as a woman and refuses to allow a man to tell her what to do. This attitude brings Irene and Dorothy closer together because Irene feels the same way after leaving her abusive fiancé behind.

“You are here to become America itself. You are nearby commissioned to represent the nation and all it means to a young soldier facing terror every day. A young soldier who may flirt with you on Tuesday and be reduced to a red stain on Wednesday.”

Captain Miller’s call to action for the women in training urges them to become everything that the soldiers miss back home. The goal of the Clubmobile service is to boost morale for the soldiers no matter what the circumstances may be, for their interaction with a soldier could very well be his last good memory before he dies.

“We are the Red Cross. Red because every American, man or woman, bleeds the same color. You will see that even the enemy does the same.”

This quote highlights the ways in which war can paradoxically unify people who gain a sense of their mutual humanity. Although the women will face frequent incidents of sexual harassment, Captain Miller tries to remind them that they are no different than the men they serve.

“She wanted to tell Dorothy that the Woodward farm was in Mattituck. And that trains ran nearby. And that she hated the pig slaughter, more than anything in her life, because the pigs knew they were going to die, and the men cut their throats and the pigs screamed like women, like children, and Irene hid in the cabinet under the sink with her ears covered, just like now…She wanted to say that.”

As Irene experiences her first bombing, she feels desperate upon the realization that she did not get to tell Dorothy more about her life. Additionally, the author creates this incongruous juxtaposition between the carnage of the battle and Irene’s memories of the farm in order to emphasize the pointlessness of the suffering and death around her.

“They were engaged on most nights in listening to confessions. After service was done for the night, the women sat out on the back steps of the truck, having a cigarette and whatever drink might be available. The boys would find them. They needed to talk and the women learned to be quiet and receptive and never criticize the nightmares and shame the boys had come to tell them in secret. It was the Great Unburdening. They vowed never to share these secrets with anyone else—though they did whisper about them to each other after midnight, and though they carried a shell of strangers’ sorrows that grew ever thicker.”

This quote highlights the theme of Mental Health Issues and Wartime Trauma. Although Dorothy and Irene do not receive training in this area, they listen to the soldier’s confessions because they know that their kind attention gives the men a sense of peace and allows them to unburden themselves. However, in unburdening themselves, the soldiers accordingly burden Dorothy and Irene with the knowledge of the actions that haunt the men most profoundly. Because the women listen to so many confessions, they carry the soldier’s burdens with them and have no real support system of their own to process this secondary trauma.

“‘I have lost my entire family,’ Dorothy continued. ‘I have lost my family home. My brother died in this war. So no, I don’t think about Smitty. I think about my duty, I think about Donny…And I think about you. We are all we have right now. You and me. I think about us getting through this. What good does it do either one of us to get all moony over some guy who might end up getting blown out of the sky? What good will you be to me then? I will walk through fire for you. I need to know you will do the same for me.’”

This quote exemplifies the theme of Female Friendship and Camaraderie. Dorothy tells Irene that she does not focus on finding love because she wants to survive with Irene. Since Dorothy and Irene only have each other in the truck, they must trust each other with their lives. This conversation marks the moment in which Irene and Dorothy come to see each other as sisters rather than just friends.

“‘When women rule the world,’ she said, ‘we’ll have smarter wars.’”

Dorothy tells Irene this after they see civilians wandering on the road listlessly. Dorothy’s comment emphasizes her belief in the strength of women, yet simultaneously acknowledges the fact that wars will never end completely because of human nature.

“In the distance, a child’s wail was silenced. Irene begged: God in Heaven, Heavenly Father, not children. Not the children. She wanted to offer herself but she knew suddenly that she was a coward. For while she would have immediately offered herself instead of those children if she were sitting in her Episcopal church back home, she would not do it here. Not now. Instead, she damned herself forever by praying an abomination: Oh, bless them, Lord. But let us live. Keep the men busy out there. Don’t let them find me.”

This quote relates the guilt that Irene feels over her desperate desire to survive. Although she does not want children to die, she shamefully prays that the German soldiers will stay outside with the children and not kill her. Although her emotions in the moment are a natural response to the threat of death, Irene carries the guilt of her prayer with her for the rest of her life.

“They held the .45 between them. It was an icon, full of religious power. It was their dearest friend. They loved it. They prayed to it. They had faith in their deliverer.”

The gun that the American soldier gives to Dorothy and Irene takes on an almost religious significance because they know that it may be the one thing that can save them from dying. Because of the desperation of their surroundings, Irene and Dorothy’s only thought as they hide from the Germans is to survive their current predicament.

“Was it grace? Was that the word she was reaching for? She feared that word. She had a dread that it meant nothing more than a temporary lull, a respite. A drawing in of breath, as if the war had only paused to collect itself for a fresh assault. A last small blessing before your brains were blown out. Irene thought that a bullet already knew her name.”

After the attack on the French town, Irene starts to feel relief over her survival. However, she knows that her relief is temporary because it will only be a matter of time before she experiences a near-death experience again. Irene’s morbid thoughts reflect her understanding that nothing guarantees her survival.

“Often the shriek of ‘I want Kaffee!’ woke her in the night, and she felt foul water falling on her in the dark. She could sense the child they’d denied standing beside the bed. She would jerk awake poisoned by guilt, ashamed that she could not remember the girl’s name. Once the bad dreams dragged her out of sleep, her worries would not let her go back.”

Irene’s PTSD symptoms worsen after the attack on the French town. She hears the voice of the German soldier who chased her and Dorothy with a bayonet, and she is also haunted by the faces of the children who died around her. Irene’s nightmares continue throughout the narrative because she never fully recovers from her experiences.

“And, Lord, if you’re not too busy, please spare me once again. I know, I know—you’ve been more than generous so far. But…just once more?”

Irene’s prayer at the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge reflects her character development. At the beginning of the novel, her prayers were full of fear, yet at this point in the narrative, Irene seems resigned to the fact that she may not survive even as she takes a moment to pray for her own safety.

“What had she done? She’d wanted blood for blood, payback for all she’d seen in this war. She’d wanted to wound the German army. But was it the right thing to do? Had she only managed to wound herself? She’d thought that she would feel liberated. That she would feel relief. That she would feel she had helped win some small part of the war. But she was shaken. She was folding up inside herself. Her stomach, her heart, somehow creased. And here she’d thought Irene—with her poetry and easy tears—was the sensitive one. Had she sinned?…She wanted to confess to Irene.”

Dorothy struggles to reconcile her action of killing a German officer because it does not give her the relief that she hoped it would. Instead, Dorothy feels worse because she understands that her participation in the war makes her complicit in the suffering around her. Dorothy’s internal conflict represents the pain that all the soldiers feel as they try to make sense of the horrible things they have done.

“You look out at this beautiful land and wonder where the evil came from.”

This quote from Irene to Dorothy shows how Irene struggles to understand that the horrors of the Nazis could come from a country as beautiful as Germany. As Irene thinks about the beauty of the countryside as well as the great artists that came from Germany, Irene realizes that any country and any people are capable of perpetrating the same horrors upon the world.

“Inside, she was confronted with stacks of suitcases. A room piled high with eyeglasses. The toys and crutches and leg braces and wooden legs were almost too much. But what finished her was something she could not explain. Some sorrow that she knew she would dream about for the rest of her life. The big room stacked with shoes. No, not stacked, piled. A pyramid of shoes. Within the shoes were stamped the visible imprints of feet, the sweat strains and the discoloration of the leather. She hung her head in that shadowing space—there where no one would see her—and her sobs beat her like body blows.”

When Dorothy finds the building filled with the possessions of the victims that the Germans murdered at the concentration camp, she feels overwhelmed. Upon seeing the sweat stains inside the shoes—a simple reminder of the reality of their deaths—Dorothy knows that she will never fully recover from what she has seen there.

“After we went up to that death camp, I think I broke. I was already feeling bad. So bad. So much. And then to be there and know there was nothing I could do—that I could not help a single person. But then, last night, we found the baby. Everybody else in the abandoned boxcar was dead. But we heard her fussing. Do you get it, Irene? It can’t be about killing. It has to be about living. Saving even one life. I was so useless at that terrible camp. I was just a tourist. But this one, I can help her. And I can’t risk anyone taking her away from me now. She is my payback, don’t you see?”

Between the concentration camp and her action of killing the German officer, Dorothy realizes that she cannot fight the anger she feels with more violence. Instead, she chooses to save the baby in the boxcar because the only thing she can think to do amidst so much death and suffering is to try and make it better for at least one person.

“Except there was no Irene left now. There was just some ghostly creature who had somehow destroyed everything she held dear. She couldn’t bear the thought—being expected to offer thrilling tales…travel highlights.”

After Irene survives the truck accident and learns of Hans’s death, she feels reduced to a ghost of who she once was. She blames herself for Dorothy’s apparent death, and she does not want to return home and pretend that the war was thrilling or exciting.

“The only thing Irene knew for sure was that she was no longer the young dreamer who had boarded that train in New York City hoping to change her life. How would she explain to her mother and her grandmother who she was not when she couldn’t even find the words to unburden herself? Would carrying all of these sorrows and torments inside her condemn her to a life sentence of silence? She could never apologize enough or give thanks enough for being the survivor.”

Irene returns as a very different person than the imaginative, hopeful woman she was at the beginning of the novel. She feels depressed over the thought of trying to talk to her mother or her grandmother about the war. Irene’s survival guilt haunts her, for she knows that she can never make up for the fact that she survived while so many people that she loved suffered violent deaths.

“Then the old woman stood on the far side of the decades, in a bright field long untended, telling herself that the war was now simply a distant memory, safely packed away. Nothing special. A common dream shared by millions. Mostly forgotten, forgotten more each day. The Clubmobilers, at the very least, had apparently been erased from memory. She found no mention anywhere of the service she and her fellow Dollies had performed.”

Years after the war, Dorothy thinks about how the experiences of the Clubmobile Service have faded from society’s collective memory. She knows that she is one of the last of her line, and after she dies, she wonders if anyone will remember the Clubmobile Service at all.

“She was finally beginning to understand. To survive meant a lifetime of forgiving. Since that night on the mountain, she had spent her days in a haunted penance she could escape only now by deciding to forgive herself. Whatever lay on the other side of her door, she knew that today she would find reconciliation.”

Irene finally realizes what the soldier on the train at the beginning of the novel was trying to tell her. Surviving the war means that she must forgive herself every day and somehow continue living despite her trauma. However, Dorothy’s arrival means that she has a hope at reconciliation that so many other people who returned from the war did not have.

“She had spent the last fifty years trying to make sense of what happened, to be able to reconcile her sorrows and traumas with the world around her. The war had been an exploding darkness, an inexplicable chaos. But here, now, was grace. Here, now, was forgiveness. When Dorothy finally opened her eyes, Irene let out a small cry and reached for her friend. Here, now, was joy.”

Despite the horrors of World War II, Dorothy’s presence means that both Irene and Dorothy have a chance at reconciliation and forgiveness. Although it does not erase what they went through during the war, they can comfort each other and help each other to heal from their shared traumatic memories.