# Nightfall explained — On a Chinese Screen

> Chapter companion for On a Chinese Screen by W. Somerset Maugham.

## What happens

The chapter describes a solitary journey at dusk through a stone gateway in a deserted landscape, evoking a powerful sense of nostalgia and melancholy. The traveler, carried in a chair, passes rice fields and a causeway, but the woodland odors trigger memories of Kentish soil and lost youth, leading to tears and a struggle for self-control as night falls.

## Themes in this chapter

### Colonial Ennui and Isolation

The solitary journey and overwhelming nostalgia highlight the traveler's isolation and emotional detachment from the foreign environment.

### Search for Meaning and Identity

The traveler's recollection of vanished youth, high hopes, and lost love underscores a quest for personal significance amid the passage of time.

## Character check-ins

### The Taipan

Implied as the traveler experiencing nostalgia and sentimentality.

## Key lines

> Then you hear no longer the measured tread of your bearers, your ears are on a sudden deaf to their sharp cries as they change the pole from shoulder to shoulder, and to the ceaseless chatter or the occasional snatch of song with which they enliven the monotonous way, for the woodland odours are the same as those which steal up from the fat Kentish soil when you pass through the woods of Bleane; and nostalgia seizes you.

The sounds of the bearers fade away as the familiar woodland scents trigger a powerful longing for home and the past.

_The sensory shift from sound to smell catalyzes the traveler's emotional regression._

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/on_a_chinese_screen_se/chapters/xliii-nightfall
- Book: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/on_a_chinese_screen_se
- All chapters: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/on_a_chinese_screen_se/chapters