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A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Night Talkers"
A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Night Talkers"
A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Night Talkers"
Ebook38 pages28 minutes

A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Night Talkers"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Night Talkers," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 27, 2016
ISBN9781535829588
A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Night Talkers"

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    Book preview

    A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Night Talkers" - Gale

    13

    Night Talkers

    Edwidge Danticat

    2002

    Introduction

    Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat published the short story Night Talkers in her 2004 collection The Dew Breaker. The stories in this collection each stand alone but are intertwined, with characters from one story often appearing briefly, in person or memory, in other tales. In an interview with Robert Birnbaum in the Morning News, Danticat explains the meaning of her title: "It comes from the Creole. It's an expression choukèt laroze; it really means somebody who breaks or shakes the dew. The dew breakers would often come in the morning, disrupting the dew on the grass. The true meaning of the term defies its seemingly poetic origins, however; the dew breakers were the minions of dictator Francois Papa Doc Duvalier, who maintained control of Haiti by intimidating and murdering his political opponents. Night Talkers is the story of a young Haitian man who lost his parents to one of these thugs. He believes he sees the guilty man years later in New York and returns to Haiti to tell the aunt who raised him. The story touches on many challenging themes, including guilt and forgiveness, loss and healing, and family and cultural traditions. Night Talkers" first appeared in the journal Callaloo in the fall of 2002 and was included in Best American Short Stories 2003.

    Author Biography

    Danticat was born on January 19, 1969, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to parents André and Rose. The family lived in Bel Air, a poor section of the city. When Danticat was only four years old, she and her little brother went to live with their uncle and aunt while their parents left for New York. They worked hard, earning money to send back to Haiti and saving what they could in hopes of bringing the children to join them.

    They were not able to secure visas for Danticat and her brother until she was twelve. By then, there were two more sons in the family, whom Danticat had met only briefly when her parents brought them on a visit in 1976. In an article in the London Guardian, Maya Jaggi reports that Danticat said it was a big challenge for us to become a family again; I felt like we'd been discarded. However, she later came to understand the sacrifices her parents made and why they made them.

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