'Night, Mother-What's your question?

When considering the Major Dramatic Question for a play like 'Night, Mother, a few things may occur to you. First of all, while this play is clearly centered around the impending suicide of the character of Jessie, that doesn't necessarily mean that the question will be,"Will Jessie commit suicide?" At no point in this play does Jessie falter in her decision. She has a very clear goal and sticks to a tight schedule. There are also very few examples, besides her mother's feeble attempts at slowing her progress, of her being shaken from her path. In this case, one might consider a better Major Dramatic Question to be,"Will Jessie's mother talk her out of committing suicide?" or "Will Jessie's mother stop her from committing suicide?" However, in this case too it is important to note that every crisis that is reached throughout the play(including Mama's failed attempts to call someone to come help her) only shows Mama desperately trying to give Jessie a reason to live, but slowly realizing that she has none. This doesn't stop her from trying to save her daughter, but it does start to unravel what she thought was her pleasant life living with her slightly odd daughter.

The most poignant moment in the play for me was when Jessie explains her choice to her mother in the "bus" metaphor:

"Mama, I know you used to ride the bus. Riding the bus and it's hot and bumpy and crowded and too noisy and more than anything in the world you want to get off and the only reason in the world you don't get off  is it's still fifty blocks from where you're going? Well I can get off right now if I want to, because even if I ride fifty more years and get off then, it's the same place when I step down to it. Whenever I feel like it, I can get off. As soon as I've had enough, it's my stop. I've had enough."

Therefore, the Major Dramatic Question could be "Will Jessie's mother make peace with her decision?" This is something she grapples with throughout the text of the play. Only at the very end, after she has yelled to Jessie that she won't honor any of her wishes and after the shot is fired, Mama finally picks up the phone to call Dawson to start getting everything on Jessie's list done.

This post was extremely depressing. Sooo…here's a picture of a cat who just can't handle it!