At Night All Blood Is Black: A Novel

The narrator’s confusion of identities in these last chapters indicates a mental health crisis, the culmination of Alfa’s war trauma. After failing to cope with his guilt over Mademba’s death through either ritualistic violence or Doctor François’s methods, Alfa revives his friend in his psyche. Earlier allusions in the text to the way war creates figurative monsters out of men become literal as Alfa believes he is also a dëmm. With a fractured consciousness, Alfa becomes the monster his French commanders assume him to be, enacting horrific violence on Mademoiselle François.

One of the ways this monstrosity manifests is in Alfa’s attempts to blur the line between rape and consensual sex. He glosses over Mademoiselle François’s struggle and claims, finally, that she becomes still and smiles, associating stillness with consent rather than death. Other language he uses to describe their encounter, however, marks it for the violent rape that it is. While recounting it, he exclaims “vive la guerre,” or “long live the war!” (114). Like Captain Armand, Alfa, dëmm-like, now professes his love for war. As alluded to in previous chapters, Alfa has allowed the “fleeting madness” of war to creep into civilian life. The shocking brutality of this rape emphasizes the true nature of war as dehumanizing and ultraviolent, even in the correct context on the battlefield.

The shifting perspectives in these chapters allow for a supernatural interpretation. In his long speech at the opening of Chapter 24, the narrator embraces a dëmm identity, and he conflates his body’s scarlessness in the final chapter with traditional stories about dëmms’ unmarked bodies. The narrator understands the French conversation between the translator and French officials, an unexplained phenomenon since Alfa does not understand French and Mademba does. However, the narrator becomes increasingly unreliable in these climactic last chapters, alternately stating, “I swear to you that I no longer know who I am” and “I believe I know who I am, I swear to you” (115, 119). Alfa’s repetitive speech patterns that are present throughout the text remain—“I swear to you” (119) and “God’s truth” (114), indicate that despite his feeling that he is Alfa, Mademba, and the dëmm all at once, the narrator is still Alfa.

In the closing reflection of the book, the narrator thinks back on how Mademba asked Alfa not to leave him in no-man’s-land and concludes that Alfa took this to mean not to leave him alone in the afterlife. He invited this dëmm to make space for him in his body. Now, he says, “whenever I think of us, he is me and I am him” (124), implying that creating this permanent state of doubling is the mysterious thing that Alfa opens the book knowing he should not have done.