A Good Night's Sleep

The story 'A good night's sleep' is a short story, which runs over one night. The narrator is a 3rd person restricted and tells the story from the protagonist George Lockhart's point-of-view.

George Lockhart is an elderly man in probably about the mid forties. His life does not have much content any more, he is divorced and live alone in a tenement building, and what he has left is his son and a teaching job. George is a lonely insomniac person with only one wish, to get a good night's sleep. The modern city life, which he clearly has no clue on, is living and roaring every night when he goes to sleep. He hears traffic, bars, music and partying noisy students, it is the nightlife, a life he is way past but gets nostalgic memories from. What also keeps him awake is his neighbours, an old drunk man upstairs who comes home wasted and sing noisy drunken songs and his life may be sadder than George's. Then there is the couple next door a young couple with a lot of temperament; witch makes their fights noisy and filled with door slamming and broken glass.

The night in the story where George can't sleep and goes out to find out what that was making the soft bumping sound against his door he finds this homeless girl. From the moment he sees the girl he gets a remarkable impression, and he has trouble with understanding the fact that she can be homeless when she is so young. He offers her to stay in his apartment for the night but she rejects his offer, and that is for George another astonishment that increases his trouble with understanding her and figuring her out.

What George just can't seem to identify with is that the girl is an independent woman who thinks she can protect herself and has a wall up, ready to defend herself.

This type of girl could probably be the lazy kind with a bad home environment, which she either escaped from and ran away or got kicked out from. Such an experience can make her belief that she can take responsibility for herself, and she doesn't assume that any one would want neither be able to help her. That is the reason why she rejects George, a decision which confuses him, because he thought he knew and understood the modern society and he had no intentions in learning more about it, since he was a teacher on that area, but this girl may have awakened his curiosity, since we get the information that homelessness will be the topic for his class next theme work.

The story's ending is very open and leaves the reader guessing. George discovers that, after he went back to his bed, the young couple next door threw the homeless girl out of the tenement, which he feels bad for. That feeling must have surprised him, because he knew that it wasn't his fault that she didn't had any where to go and she had been so offending and scorned at him, but still he felt sorry that she got kicked out and that she didn't