Djuna Barne's Nightwood , the complicated yet breathtaking novel, takes the reader to the queer society, the world full of mysterious human beasts. The modernist novel creates brilliant fiction in the mind of readers, leaving them in deep thoughts. Readers start to read the story, hoping that they would understand the solid meaning of the text, but they soon get lost in the Berlin and Paris outskirts, confused in the company of rejected and misunderstood social dysfunction in society. Barnes probably had an important goal in her mind when she was planning and mapping this perilous journey for the readers. Her main intention was to illustrate to the readers that only those who are outside the socially acceptable system and those who do not follow the rules brought by civilization are the ones who genuinely understand and taste life. This novel, proud of its reasoning and prone to making categories of everything, reminds the society that humans are no longer able to see things beyond logic and science.
The author creates possibilities for the 'call of the wild' in the mind of the reader when she makes Robin Vote, the obstinate and immoral man, the central character. According to Barnes, for one to understand queer love, he or she must degrade to the level of an animal. Similarly, for one to understand lesbian love, one has to stop to reason, feel the shame associated, remember morals, and go back to his or her basic instincts. All characters of Barnes' novel find themselves, at a point, disagreeing with the prevailing norms except Robin, who is always on the border between human and animal instincts.
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It is quite evident that this novel belongs to the neurotic post-war period and a particular writing school. The author is an American, but she stays in Paris, and the characters are familiar though extraordinary individuals are hunting cafes, strolling in unfamiliar costumes in the Luxembourg Gardens, and banding together around St. Sulpice like a religious order. This small world seems to be vanishing or merging into different forms, and the author seems to have somehow lost herself in the past while trying to reconstruct the world with high power and concision.
