Alex's Reviews > Goodnight Moon

Margaret Wise Brown's nihilistic classic is a howling renunciation of God, here depicted as a "quiet old lady whispering 'hush'." There is no afterlife here, no reward, no release from the crushing mundanity of life. There is only the bowl of pathetic mush, the forlorn mittens, the abandoned balloon, the telephone that never rings. We live our lives in a "great green room", but at the end we accumulate nothing but the discarded trappings of our childhoods. Even love cannot offer solace: where are our families when the end comes? "Goodnight nobody," we call into the blackness.

There is no hope in the world without us. We know what will happen, when we close our eyes, to the young mouse left alone with two kittens. They will toy with him; they will torture him and leave his decapitated body on our pillow. But we will never awake to see its guts splayed out near our heads. "Goodnight air," the poem ends. "Goodnight noises everywhere." We fall, silently, into the void.