A Sanctuary for the Past: Narrative Dissonance and Emotional Truth in Jayne Anne Phillips’ Night Watch

This paper examines how Jayne Anne Phillips’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Night Watch (2023), uses dissonant narrative techniques to convey feelings of loss and (un)belonging in post-Civil War America. I argue that this dissonance is the result of two intentionally misaligned narrative axes, narrative and affective, which create a jarring version of the past that feels more emotionally authentic than the historical facts alone.

The emotional authenticity of Phillips’ historical reconstruction is reinforced by the central role of the Trans-Allegheny asylum in the narrative: as the main characters grapple with the trauma of uprootedness and a fundamentally altered sense of self, the asylum becomes a place where every version of the past matters, allowing them to fully confront the War’s impact.

By focusing on feelings of adriftness and disorientation in both style and structure, Phillips renders the affective experience of the Civil War tangible and forces us to recognize and reckon with its present-day resonances.