Sample Student Paper #2
English 4
10/19/12
It Is What It Isn’t
Most all of us have toiled in a monotonous, low paying job. It can dull the spirit and send one
off to dreamy and wistful places in the mind. Combine the sense of a yearning soul, with the
actuality of spending one’s remaining lifetime as a mere cog in the machinery of an
industrialized and apathetic world, and you have poet Lynda Hull’s “Night Waitress”. In this
starkly beautiful poem, Hull transports the reader into the mind of a late night diner waitress,
providing witness to the speaker’s reverie. The waitress speaker daydreams her way through
another monotonous and unrewarding shift, reflecting on her lower-caste anonymity, the stigma
of her employment, her lack of self-fulfillment, and her insignificance in the grander scheme of
things. The speaker, awash in the faded melancholy of working class drudgery, cannot help but
to indulge herself in fantasies of the bourgeois life. Hull paints a picture of muted colors and
proletarian icons in a noiresque diner reminiscent of “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams”. Hull’s
“ Night Waitress” gives the reader a lasting impression of empathetic connection with the
working class speaker’s longing for fulfillment, and her achingly lonely, moribund existence in a
modern industrialized society. Beyond this, the reader may find an allusion of prelude to the
self-determination of the proletariat.
Hull begins with a “soft fade” from the speaker’s droning reality of diner work. She
pauses and catches an image of her face “reflected in the plate glass” (1) of the dessert cabinet.
From her angle of view “the pies/look like clouds drifting off [her] shoulder”. (1/2) This mirage
leads the speaker to begin her own reflections on her unremarkable existence. The speaker has
convinced herself that she is an ordinary looking and undistinguished member of the working
class. She tells herself that her “face has character, / not beauty....it is [her] mother’s Slavic
face”. (3/4) In this way the speaker is acknowledging her shared physical traits inherited from
her mother. The speaker has also inherited the lower class employment of her mother, a woman
who “washed the floor on hands and knees”. (5) The speaker’s job as a lowly night waitress
reinforces her worker bee lineage. The speaker refers to an absence of spiritual fulfillment,
which is actually a departure from her mother’s condition. While the speaker’ s mother worked
“below the Black Madonna/ [and prayed] to her god of sorrows and visions” (6/7), the speaker
notes that no god bathes her in pious light. The spiritual presence of God “is not here tonight
[for her] when [she] lays out the plates”. (8) This first stanza reveals quite a bit about the
speaker’s mental and physical state of being. The speaker is beginning to lose herself in dreamy
contemplation, which she embraces to escape her laborious and spiritually devoid reality.
The second stanza touches upon the social implications of the worker’s conditions. The
speaker feels anonymous and projects anonymity upon the people around her. She describes the
late night customers as “men [who] all look/as if they’d never had mothers”. (10-11). This
suggests that they are unloved and uncared for by themselves and by others. The unloved men
“do not see her”(12). She is simply the one who “brings the cups/...bring[s] the silver”(12-13).
In the face of this anonymity the speaker aches for the touch of another person. She muses
about “the man /who leans over the jukebox nightly/pressing the combinations/of numbers”(1316). She “would not stop him/ if he touched [her], but it’s only songs/of risky love he leans
into”(16-18). This man is symbolic of the modern properly distracted subject. He is too involved
with a machine to take any notice of another individual who is in dire want of human connection.
Hull uses these nameless/motherless representations as symbols of the loss of individuality
within the modern urban socio-economic system. This reader can begin to see the trappings of a
socio-political message being woven into the poem. The loss of individualization, religious
vacuity and general anonymity within a socio-economic system can be linked with the
proletarian class struggle and the alienation of one’s humanity, emblematic of Marxist theory.
Hull opens the door to the speaker’s mind’s eye, providing a vivid depiction of how the speaker
envisions her projected self. This takes the reader far beyond her unsatisfying subsistence. She
dreams of industrially rich icons and freedom from her convention. The speaker wants “a song
that rolls/through the night like a big Cadillac/past factories to the refineries/squatting on the bay,
round and shiny/as the coffee urn warming my palm”(24-28). The “song” the speaker wants is a
metaphor of the life she wants. It is her spirit, her inner self, that craves the freedom to drive
past the symbols of industrialized development, and achieve some sense of removal from them.
The speaker envisions her song as a luxurious and comfortable car, a seemingly attainable
material achievement. However, her metaphorical car/spirit must still escape the industrial
imagery and go beyond, a somewhat unattainable feat considering her circumstances. It would
take a leap of faith and determination to accomplish this, something the speaker is not equipped
to perform. The heat of the urn in her hand seems to bring her back to her present situation and
the speaker returns to reflecting on her actual life; monotonous, empty and unrewarding.
At the poem’s turn the speaker attempts to find comfort in the security of her private property.
As she works, “the coffee cruises [her] mind/visiting the most remote way stations”(29-30). She
begins to reflect on her possessions and the scant security they lend her and what they represent.
The speaker “think[s] of [her] room as a calm arrival/each book and lamp in its place” (31-32).
Her room is her place of restive solace, as thinly furnished as her life, yet restorative. It is a
monk-like cubicle, spartan and minimalist. She thinks of the items she needs to recover and and
prepare for her next shift. They are few in number but they are hers alone. The lamp and books
allow her to escape and recharge in her downtime. Most importantly is the presence of a “
calendar/on [her] wall [which] predicts no disaster” (32-33). This is the quintessential material
icon of the proletariat. The calendar dictates her unfulfilling and automatonic existence. Instead
of being filled with anticipatory notes and dates of opportunity, it shows “only another white
square waiting/to be filled like the desire that fills/jail cells” (34-36) The calendar is an actively
inanimate symbol of her future; empty, unexciting and repetitive. It predicts another day,
another week, another month and year of fruitless yearning for a change which will never occur.
The speaker, thinking in the most simplistic of terms of material gain, needs little to really satisfy
her. What she really wants is to think of herself as grander, or more significant than she is. She
desires to escape her pathetically unimportant and unrecognized role and become someone.
Sadly, the mere act of envisioning this goal returns her to the prisoner-like existence within the
socio-economic machine in which she toils.
Hull’s conclusion of “Night Waitress” finds the speaker at the end of another long, unnoteworthy
graveyard shift. It is the beginning of a new day, but there is no newness for the night waitress. It
has been a thoroughly unremarkable shift except for her meanderings of pensive melancholy.
She is exhausted from her labor and weary of examining her uninspired existence. Her “mouth
is bitter with sleeplessness”. (40) The hum of industrialized society comes to life around her in
the early morning hours as more nameless/motherless “men surge to the factories” (41) , their
proletariat “fingers grip[ping] lunch box handles” (42) But the speaker is worn out and “too
tired/to look” (40-41) at their iconic “belt buckles [that] gleam” (43) To the speaker, “it’s not
romantic when the sun unlids/the end of the avenue”. (44-45)
The emerging daylight holds no promise for her. It is not a symbol of cyclic rebirth but rather
one of predictable ennui. The speaker, submitted to her fate, is too tired to imagine anymore.
The last of her spirit was spent while she was working in the diner. She feels herself “fading/in
the mornings insinuations” (45-46) of opportunity. The speaker has once again resigned herself
to her seemingly inescapable fate as a small cog in “this frail machinery” (49) of the
industrialized socio-economic machine.
Linda Hull’s “Night Waitress” provides an intimate look into the mind and heart of a
working class woman who finds little fulfillment in her life’s role. It causes the reader to
empathize with her situation and maybe even draw some comparisons with their own
circumstances. In a deeper sense, “Night Waitress” is an expose on the defeating psychological
impact that performing a monotonous, insignificant role in a modern industrial society can have
on one’s spirit. In her poem Hull is telling us that a person with no attainable goals and dreams
is hardly a person at all. Endlessly engaging in an automatonic and ungratifying job in a
machine driven society transforms people into empty, easily replacable, throw-away pieces; not
much more than meat puppets. At it’s most profound depth, underneath the messaged themes
of personal and societal deficiency, “Night Waitress” is a vignette on the proletariat condition
before it has contemplated revolution.