“He makes his own sun. Decides he prefers the night.”

“He makes his own sun. Decides he prefers the night.” is a compact expression of Isaac’s self-fashioned identity as he begins his journey from Buell toward California. Spoken by the narration about the figure Isaac calls the kid, the line frames his preference for darkness as both an act of independence and part of a private mythology of escape.

Context and Meaning

Isaac follows the railway away from the steel mill, past the town and his old school, until familiar places disappear from view. Alone on the dark, winding railbed, he imagines the kid as a wanderer who will be fine: “King of the snakes and duke of all hoboes.” The image of making one’s own sun extends that self-invention. Rather than simply endure the night, the kid claims it as a chosen condition, a world in which he can define himself apart from home and its expectations.

Night Against Nature’s Clock

The phrase gains force as the scene turns toward dawn. Isaac watches the sky lighten; then one bird chirps, another answers, and the woods fill with birdsong and movement. The birds, including tanagers, grosbeaks, and orioles, seem to live by shared, unchanging rules. Against their synchronized return to daylight, the kid appears deliberately out of step. The contrast makes the declaration less a literal claim of control over the sun than an assertion of chosen difference: nature keeps its clock, while he imagines himself free to prefer the night.

Narrative Function

The short, declarative sentences make the phrase sound like a maxim, but the surrounding scene also exposes the tension inside it. Isaac is leaving familiar ground and heading toward the warmth of his imagined California desert, yet his confidence is voiced through the protective figure of the kid. The line therefore joins movement and self-mythologizing: it gives the departure a defiant cadence while showing how Isaac recasts vulnerability and solitude as a chosen identity. As daylight reaches the opposite bank of the river, the night he has claimed begins to recede; his next decision is to approach the traincar plant from the rear and retrieve his belongings.