The first feature readers notice about Nightwood is its language. American writer Ernest Hemingway revolutionized the English language by eliminating what he thought were its inessential elements, meaning most adjectives and adverbs, shortening and simplifying his sentences in the process. To the reader familiar with Hemingway’s work and with that of the writers he influenced, Nightwood is a rich feast— perhaps too rich. Like Hemingway, Barnes began her writing career as a journalist, but her journalistic voice was ironic and was often colored by the subject matter she chose. Two other influences are apparent: the example of Irish writer James Joyce, whose experimental novel Ulysses (1922) Barnes admired; and the work of the Elizabethan writers, whose language was notably rich and vigorous.

Barnes generally maintains an ironic distance from her characters, using a mouthpiece, Matthew O’Connor, to comment more directly on them and their actions. Matthew’s monologues threaten to swamp the text of Nightwood, disarranging its generally chronological order and illustrating the manner in which language can both establish and destabilize categories. An American of Irish origin who lives in Europe, a man who dresses in women’s clothes but is attracted to his own sex, a doctor who is not a doctor—Matthew is a perfect spokesman for the topsy-turvy world around him.

Although the content of Nightwood may seem almost fantastic, in one sense it is an accurate portrayal of life among a particular group of people at a particular time and in particular places. The old European patriarchal order of stability and convention had been destroyed during World War I, the war that many thought would end all wars, and in the ensuing vacuum, social adjustment and sexual experimentation became the norm. (It is Felix’s bad fortune to live at the very historical moment that the history he so craves is vanishing.)

Americans in search of the culture they believed their own country could not provide flocked to Europe, as did those (and they were often the same) who felt stifled by the sexual mores that continued to hold sway at home. Barnes was a member of this English-speaking community that settled in Paris (and, to a lesser extent, Berlin) after World War I and flourished until the onset of World War II. One sees this generation in the work of Barnes’s fellow American writers Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein (who called it a “lost generation”), but Nightwood is its fullest portrayal. Even Barnes’s most “fantastic” character, Matthew, turns out to be a recognizable portrait of one of its members.

Matthew’s long disquisition on “the night” establishes the novel’s core of meaning and clarifies many of its themes. Responding to Nora’s pained assertion (referring to Robin) that night changes one’s identity, even during sleep, he insists that day and night are two different worlds, corresponding to the rational and instinctual, or conscious and unconscious, sides of the personality. Some nationalities—the French, for example—maintain their balance between the two. Americans, however, separate the two so completely that they lose their way, relying on alcohol to reestablish the connection. Death, sleep, and love, explains Matthew, are all aspects of the night. The implication, which Nora clearly does not want to hear, is that Robin lives almost entirely in this night, whereas Nora is capable only of dipping into it.

Robin appears to be the most important character in Nightwood, but Matthew himself is at the novel’s center. He comes close to witnessing or being aware of everything that takes place, and seems to know everyone. (He even claims to be the doctor who delivered Nora.) If Matthew approaches omniscience and omnipresence, however, he is far from being omnipotent. He offers solace but little else. He moves with ease between the realms of day and night, accumulating a world of pain, but—like the writer herself—has little more than words to show for it.