Nightfall, By Issac Asimov

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Jesse Lupini                September 8, 2007

Commentary for Nightfall

By Isaac Asimov

        Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov, takes a simple premise, commonplace for us, and puts it in a foreign context. In Nightfall’s world, a planet with six suns, no one is ever in the dark. There is no night, as the day is constant and unending. Every 2049 years, at a time when only one sun is visible, it eclipses for twelve hours. For a people who never experience it, the dark can become gravely dangerous. In the final thirty lines of the story, Lagash, the planet in question, slips into darkness and the stars come out for the first time in millennia. As the characters realize the immensity of their universe, the narrator mirrors this epiphany by suddenly becoming all knowing. As the overwhelming power of the dark is demonstrated, separation of the situation and cause in the writing lets the reader empathize with a people whom we cannot imagine.

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        At just the moment when the light disappears to be replaced by a “blood-curdling blackness”, the stars shine through. The narrator, who up to this point showed knowledge comparable only to the characters themselves, describes the stars: “Not just earth’s feeble thirty-six hundred stars visible to the eye; Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in it’s awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world.” Having never seen stars, or forced to remain in the dark before, ...

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