NIght Crawlers

Night crawlers symbolize youth and comfort in one's surroundings. The narrator notes that he and his friends would go pick night crawlers out of the dirt on evenings after it rained. "They somehow resisted," the narrator says, "they hung on to their holes without any hands. We could feel the fear in them as they tried to fight back, so tiny compared with us, though we were only kids, and, when we got them out, the way they twisted and writhed about seemed like silent screaming" (4-5). Here, the author uses night crawlers as a metaphor for childhood and the desire to remain safe and insulated by one's surroundings forever. Over the course of the narrative, the narrator must confront his impending adolescence in much the same way the night crawlers are yanked up from the ground.

Apartment Building

The apartment building in which the...