Sleepless Nights is a semi-biographic view into the life of author and main character Elizabeth Hardwick. She discusses topics such as people who she has lost, places that she has been, people she has had close relationships with, among many other things. There is a lot of discussion regarding the plot, or the lack of plot in this this book. In another class (creative nonfiction), it was mentioned that plot does not necessarily have to further the events of the narrative, but plot can also correspond with the changes that the narrator faces and their ability of processing these changes. The character of Elizabeth definitely goes through a change through the work. It is the reader that naturally tries to oppose a plot on the text, and is turned away when there is a lack of traditional plot. The reader wants a logical plot in order to make sense of what the author has written. After all, life is plotless.
Part of what made this text so challenging it is not easy for the reader to take many roles in order to “get the text”. At the beginning of the text, it was difficult to authentic submission due to the language that the author uses and the structure that she uses. At the start of the book, Elizabeth is young and not very experienced. She does not make the best choices, and her life is all tangled and confused, much like the text of the book. An example of this can be seen here:
“No power of the mind can decipher why the difference in our ages defined everything to me, cast over every clarity a dark and sinister puzzle. There in the light, his exorbitant desire to please.”(15)
Elizabeth’s life is a dark and scary place, and she want to find clarity, much like the reader wants to find clarity in the text. The more of the text that the reader reads, they will find that it easier to understand, much like how Elizabeth finds clarity of her life through experience.
The narrator of Sleepless Nights is a younger, more naive version of the author, Elizabeth Hardwick. She writes a lot about the other people who she have come into contact with over the years, such as singer Billie Holiday, her old roommate J, and her siblings, just to name a few. As the narrator, she is constantly trying to connect with the audience. The many different characters that she writes about have not only influenced her, but Hardwick also is able to see parts of herself in them as well. The character of Alex is described as:
“He was a sort of hectic Hermes, working in Hades, now buying cigarettes, now darting back to the bedroom, now almost inaudible on the phone, ordering or disposing of something in a light, shaky voice.” (83).
Like Alex, Hardwick can also be seen as a “hectic Hermes, working in Hades” herself darting from moment to moment without much of a logical sequence. All of these different people contain different traits and aspects that she sees in herself. This is Hardwick’s way letting the reader take on a “readerly role”. The reader wants to learn more about the lives of all these different people, but what they actually receive is the life of Elizabeth told from many different angles.
Book Reader's Web 
In the beginning of this post you say, “it was mentioned that plot does not necessarily have to further the events of the narrative, but plot can also correspond with the changes that the narrator faces and their ability of processing these changes.” I respect that you answered our questions about the plot in this book, but I do wonder about one thing I did not see addressed here. You bring this up, but you do not tell us who the reader must become in order to see that the plot is in the form of Elizabeth’s development. I do like the readerly role you mentioned at the end, that we receive the life of Elizabeth through her stories and perspectives on these stories, but I’m not so sure it addresses who I must become to understand the plot. The plot, or what I perceived as a lack thereof, made this book difficult for me. I couldn’t focus because I felt like I was in a stream of consciousness, so I would then go off on my own train of thought. After reading this post, I understand why Elizabeth narrates like that. Now I just need to understand how be the reader that she needs me to be. I propose that in order to be a submissive reader, in order to let the text work on me I must do as Elizabeth says: “Borges asks this ‘Are not the fervent Shakespeareans who give themselves over to a line of Shakespeare, are they not, literally, Shakespeare?” (9). We have to give ourselves over to the book, allow ourselves to molded and shaped, slaves to this book, in order to know what is actually going on within Elizabeth. Only then will we truly understand that the plot is within the change, within the development of Elizabeth herself.
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Coming off what Maddie had said, I too found this story hard to read not because it was difficult or archaic but that it was just too much work to keep up. Your blog post has explained how I was feeling in words perfectly and my own resistance in reading made me not want to continue or not care so much. But this revealed to me that I had to immerse myself more and understand where the author was coming from the understand the text. I will say though that this still turned me off to the story and I will keep to my opinion in not liking the story very much because of how chaotic it was and I could see others feeling this way too. My favorite part of your blog was this line: “As the narrator, she is constantly trying to connect with the audience. The many different characters that she writes about have not only influenced her, but Hardwick also is able to see parts of herself in them as well.” I thought this summed up the story very well.
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This blog post does a good job at analyzing the relationship between the reader and the text when reading this novel. Toward the end of your first paragraph, you discuss the opposition that a reader may have toward this text. I believe that Hardwick constructed her novel in this way as to make the reader “work” for it. By this I mean that if she had wanted to, the events in this book could have been written out in chronological order so that the reader could more easily understand it. This was not done, however, because the recollections in this book do not constitute its plot. Rather, the plot is formed when the reader is able to evaluate Hardwick’s changes in mood and disposition when discussing different events. I found it extremely interesting that you discussed the way the narrator seeks clarity through her reflections while the reader simultaneously seeks clarity through reading about these events. This was something that I had picked up on through my reading, but had been unable to articulate up until now. Good work on this blog!
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