'Night, Mother

     The obvious questions of 'Night, Mother would be "does Jesse Kill herself," "Will momma stop Jesse," or any other question pertaining to the suicide of Jesse. She makes it clear that her decision is to kill herself and the decision was not argued about too deeply after the fact was stated. Christmas was mentioned with an understanding ambiguous to the audience, and there was the initial shock to be expected from Momma. Other than that though, the suicide was not really addressed. I would like to ask the question though, "will Jesse and Momma find closure?" Throughout the entire play Jesse and Momma are trying to make connections with each other, Jesse is finishing up things before she has to go, repeatedly we see misconnections between the two. The ultimate example would be the image of the making of the hot chocolate on stage. Hot chocolate to a great majority of the rest of the world represents warmth and comfort and a delightful treat. I doubt anyone would belittle the greatness that is hot chocolate. But the characters don't even like the hot chocolate. This final pleasantry is literally wasted and it is such a sad image because it demonstrates the misconnections. They are trying to do things right, but it ends up in failure. At the very end Momma tries hard to stave off the inevitable, trying to get Jesse to do the manicure, but time was up by Jesse's decision. I don't think that Momma really connected to Jesse until it was too late. Despite everything she did and tried, she couldn't save her daughter, who arguably wasn't her daughter anymore, but that is a different perspective to be argued later. So do they connect at the end? Not entirely, and the unfortunate closure for Momma was the sound of a gunshot.