Suddenly I am in a fever of anxiety to get there. Let’s be on our way, let’s be on our way....Why shouldn’t we get as far as Brussels? All right, we’ll get as far as Brussels; might be something doing in Brussels. Sasha once again reminisces about her relationship with Enno. They got married on a whim in London, got drunk that night, and traveled to Amsterdam. They each thought the other had a lot of money, but they were both wrong. Amsterdam was enjoyable, but Enno kept talking about how much better life would be for them once they got to Paris. After a few days, they hastily set off for Paris but ended up getting stranded in Brussels because they had almost no money. Thankfully, Sasha remembered a man she once went out with who lived in Brussels, so she borrowed money from him (enduring an uncomfortable kiss from him as a result). This book is mostly character driven, rather than plot driven- ( which I enjoyed - as I tend to be more relationship oriented than I am hard core science fiction oriented).... Much may be ascertained from this remarkable passage. First, there is the name of the dress shop owner, Mr. Blank. One may wonder as to the veracity of the name Sasha gives him. In Jean Rhys: A Critical Study, Thomas F. Staley writes, “‘Mr. Blank’ becomes the archetype of all those forces which hold her hostage.” He goes on to argue, “The malignancy of the faceless and nameless oppressor is seen more clearly by Sasha than by any of Rhys’s other heroines. From this combination of paranoia and insight, Sasha recognizes those forces in society which turn her into a weak and helpless figure who simply cannot get on” (86). The mask Sasha Jensen wears acts as a buffer of self-defense. She has crafted it, over many years, with the tears of rejection and abuse. Her entire life encompasses sadness. Early in the novel, Sasha, who is visiting Paris for the second time, with the intention of drinking herself to death, dreams of her father:

Good Morning, Midnight Character Analysis | LitCharts Good Morning, Midnight Character Analysis | LitCharts

This would seem to indicate a small breakthrough. After all, Sasha admits that she does not care what other people think of her hat. However, she still takes the time to observe the faces of the other patrons in the restaurant. If she really did not care what they thought, she would not have bothered to look for their reactions. More disturbing still, as Joy Castro argues in her critical essay, “Jean Rhys,” Sasha’s attempts at transformation “can be seen as a complete erasure of Sasha’s personality.” Castro sees Sasha’s hair dye, in particular, as the “final relinquishment of individual vision, of the ability to perceive (if not control) her own life in an original way” (20). This idea of seeking comfort by staying in bed brings forth another theme: her preoccupation with rooms. The rooms that she lives in become another way that routines and structures are imposed – both physically and emotionally. Physically, it gives Sasha somewhere to hide: This essay explores obfuscation and nonrecognition in Jean Rhys's 1939 novel, Good Morning, Midnight. The protagonist, Sasha Jansen, decries the fact that people in general do not think, she brings her own ability to think into question, and the text is filled with uncertainties. Rhys’s depiction of the political realities of the late 1930s renders the world of the novel one in which a universal ‘I think’ cannot be presupposed. This essay focuses on the Exhibition and the years of Good Morning, Midnight: 1937, when it is set, and 1939 when it was published. It proposes that the text’s insistence on masking meaning and conveying uncertainties can be read as a response to the monumental unreality and violence of the spectacle of the 1937 World Exposition in Paris. This spectacle is yoked in the text to anti-Semitism in Germany and France in the late 1930s and Sasha’s gaze is read here as a refusal of the terms of representation which serve the realities of political persecution. The novel underscores the significance of what is not represented, and focusing on Sasha’s gaze at the Exhibition provides a positive if difficult way of reading her welcoming of the commis at the novel’s close. The blind spots in this novel affirm the necessity and potential of non-didactic art, refusing the delineated, direct message, and affirming art as that which must help us to not look away from the hard task of thinking.

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this is an interesting spin on the apocalypse genre: the end of the world as experienced by two characters who have already distanced themselves from the bustle of humanity - an astronomer named augustine who has been posted at an arctic research station for three years, and an astronaut named sully, returning to earth with her crew after a mission studying the moons of jupiter. Emery, Mary Lou. 1990. Jean Rhys at “World's End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (Austin: University of Texas Press)— 1997. ‘Refiguring the Postcolonial Imagination: Tropes of Visuality in Writing by Rhys, Kincaid, and Cliff’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature,16/2 (Autumn): 259-280 Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights.” Climax: René pins Sasha on the bed and attempts to rape her but then stops when she tells him he can take her money. Doniger, Wendy. “Self-Impersonation In World Literature.” The Kenyon Review 26.2 (Spring 2004): 101-125.

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys - BBC

At its heart, this book is about loneliness – but also about connectedness, the primal need for humans to unite with one another. Rhys fans should go for Good Morning, Midnight or a group of her astonishing stories (I’d suggest Vienne, Till September Petronella, and Tigers Are Better-Looking.) But those new to Rhys will enjoy discussing Wide Sargasso Sea, the heartbreaking prequel to Jane Eyre which was published in 1966. Rhys was 76 and had almost given up hope of literary recognition until it won the WH Smith literary award and she was propelled into the limelight. Set in Jamaica and on another unnamed Caribbean island, Sargasso draws on Rhys’s intense memories of Dominica, where she told friends that she wanted to be buried, “under a flamboyant tree”. And that – if you really want to understand what made Jean Rhys the great writer she would become – is where to go and look for her.

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A view from PEARL (Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Lab)in Eureka, Nunavut - from TheStar.com – photo by Dan Weaver This essay focuses on the manifestation of Nazism at the Exposition, but other forms of 1930s totalitarian politics feature in the text: Franco's brand of nationalism, for example, isa presence in this novel. I use the term fascism to refer to Nazism and also, following Holden (1999), to the political logics of supremacy, uniformity, rationalisation and domination which determine various oppressive systems and practices.

Good Morning, Midnight Themes | LitCharts Good Morning, Midnight Themes | LitCharts

Well, sometimes it's a fine day isn't it? Sometimes the skies are blue. Sometimes the air is light, easy to breathe. I find it a bit scary that I sometimes during this book felt that I could relate so much to this, I find, messed up character. I look straight into his eyes and despise another poor devil of a human being for the last time. For the last time…

The structural elements that Rhys repeats within the novel reveal a conflict at the heart of the narrative. The repetition of a daily routine helps Sasha to navigate her life in the present, yet there is a constant friction with the darker side of repetition, and the difficulty in escaping the routines imposed by time and experience: People masquerade as themselves all the time; the mythology of self-imitation stretches from ancient India to Hollywood and prevails in real life as well as fiction, which is sometimes, contrary to public opinion, stranger than truth. (102) For some reason I am very vexed at this. I start wondering why I am there at all… I want to get away. I want to be out of the place […] I want to go by myself, to get into a taxi and drive along the street, to stand by myself and look down at the fountains in the cold light. Augustine knew only about the distant stars, billions of miles away. He'd been moving from place to place his entire life and had never bothered to learn anything about the cultures or wildlife or geography that he encountered, the things right in front of him. They seemed passing, trivial. His gaze had always been far-flung. He'd accumulated local knowledge only by accident. While his colleagues explored the regions of their various research posts, hiking in the woods or touring the cities, Augustine only delved deeper into the skies, reading every book, every article that crossed his path, and spending seventy-hour weeks in the observatory, trying to catch a glimpse of thirteen billion years ago, scarcely aware of the moment he was living in…When he considered how long he had been alive, it seemed remarkable how little he had experienced. ugh, i had to pause this over a week ago and i'm finally able to return to it. sorry, book - thanks for waiting! good thing you're not a gerbil or you'd probably have eaten your toes or something by now.

Good Morning, Midnight: Masks and Consequences | The Artifice Good Morning, Midnight: Masks and Consequences | The Artifice

Sasha refuses to recognize the values of the spectacle’s politics. Turning to Deleuze's critique, we can read the blind spot in the place of the Exhibition as a denunciation of the three main elements of the Image of thought: the ‘image of a naturally upright thought, which knows what it means to think’, an ‘in principle natural common sense’, and a ‘transcendental model of recognition’ (DR: 170). Sasha’s detached ‘schoolmistress’s voice’ that underscores her nonunitary subjectivity, Delmar's and René’s anti-Semitism, René’s relegation of the Star of Peace to something ‘mesquin’ (meaning petty or mean), and the nature of the absent spectacle itself constitute Rhys’s modernist version of the denial of the first two elements. The world of this Exhibition allows no room for difference except as that which is at best secondary, relegated to categorised representations of the exotic ‘other’, and at worst that which is unacceptable for the totalitarian state. Recognition of any sort would be the adoption of an epistemology according to a model of dominant visuality and the denigration of difference. Sasha’s refusal to see the Exhibition is an almost laying bare of the identity-centered function of the third element, the model of recognition which ‘remains sovereign and defines the orientation of the philosophical analysis of what it means to think’ (DR: 171). Her blindness is a refusal to orient her thought solely towards identity and opposition, analogy and resemblance. There seems to be adequate reason to judge Sasha’s aesthetic response a philosophical one rather than as just the absence of her knowledge or thought, although this absence may perhaps, as in the episode with Mr Blank, form the condition of the act of thinking: I know all about myself now, I know. You've told me so often. You haven't left me one rag of illusion to clothe myself in.”

it's a slow-moving, highly descriptive book that makes the reader feel the weight of the emptiness and the terrible beauty of a silent world. it's so beautifully written that i can excuse the heavy-handedness of its treatment of coincidence and reveals. i may have rolled my eyes at one point, but for a debut novel, this isn't necessarily a dealbreaker - it just needed a little more finesse in handling those parts, and she handled the resolution well, avoiding a happy-slappy unrealistic ending. except for those few clunky bits, it's a very strong book. At the same time, Mission Specialist Sullivan is aboard the Aether on its return flight from Jupiter. The astronauts are the first human beings to delve this deep into space, and Sully has made peace with the sacrifices required of her: a daughter left behind, a marriage ended. So far the journey has been a success, but when Mission Control falls inexplicably silent, Sully and her crew mates are forced to wonder if they will ever get home. Unable to exist unseen by the outside world, Sasha decides to mask herself visibly. According to Mary Lou Emery, in Jean Rhys at “World’s End”, “Sasha does what some anthropologists claim people do everywhere when the danger of death looms too menacingly—she invents a ritual” (152). She decides to dye her hair. Later, she will buy a new hat, and later still, some new clothes. Sasha does this, again, in an effort to hide her sad life behind a mask. After buying her hat, which she refers to as an “extraordinary ritual”, Sasha feels a rare sense of giddiness. “I feel saner and happier after this. I go to a restaurant near by and eat a large meal, at the same time carefully watching the effect of the hat on the other people in the room, comme ςa. Nobody stares at me, which I think is a good sign” (70). I've been so ridiculous all my life that a little bit more or a little bit less hardly matters now.” Admittedly, there are a number of beautiful and honest moments in the novel in terms of the writing itself, but all in all, Good Morning, Midnight was unsatisfactory. Even in the works of some of my favourite, dark and most misanthropic of writers, there is normally some purpose, something disturbing that jars us out of our complacency and allows us to see the human condition in a new light, but unfortunately, that is not the case here.