49 pages • 1 hour read
Lily Brooks-DaltonGood Morning, Midnight
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Augustine “Augie” Lofthouse, observing the first dawn since the season of days-long darkness in the Arctic, takes in the frozen landscape and contemplates his younger years. He recalls relocating “whenever his environment rejected him, as it often did” (4), finding new places to go and more work to do as an astrophysicist. Having spent his life observing the sky and pursuing knowledge of the universe, he stares at the land around him and recognizes how little he truly knows.
Augie imagines what it would be like to live as a bear he observes navigating the mountain ridges, recognizing in it a similar incomprehension of emotions like love. He has only experienced “lesser emotions,” which he avoids through celestial observation, the only thing about which he has ever felt deeper emotions.
Thinking about love reminds Augie of the one woman for whom he’d felt anything remotely close, Jean Sullivan, a doctoral candidate he impregnated in New Mexico. Upon her refusal to obtain an abortion, Augie fled, fearing he wouldn’t love the child. He eventually searched out the child’s name and birthday, sending gifts for several years before losing track of her when she and her mother moved.
After returning to the observatory, winded from age and the three-story climb, Augie searches for Iris, a girl who was left behind during the evacuation of the station. Augie, who is 78 and feeling his body break down, chose to stay behind when the Air Force arrived with news of “something catastrophic” affecting the rest of the planet. Iris’s presence remains a mystery to Augie, despite his attempts to radio the outside world upon discovering her. Iris does not speak much, a habit Augie appreciates, and he provides food and companionship.
Iris’s presence reminds Augie of his childhood with an “adored” but emotionally unpredictable mother, as well as his younger adulthood. The latter was full of tropical observatories, women, and crowds of academic admirers. In the face of whatever has befallen the world outside the Arctic, such accomplishments seem meaningless, and he begins to appreciate Iris’s company. They rearrange the observatory to their liking and their current needs, throwing out unnecessary equipment, gathering food and other essentials, and bringing items from other sections of the observatory into the only level Augie now heats.
Contemplating the bleakness of Iris’s future in the Arctic makes Augie angry that he bears responsibility for her. He redirects his attention to the skies, observing the International Space Station in orbit around the now-quiet Earth.
Chapter 2 Summary
Sully wakes as a dawn simulator slowly lights the crew living quarters (or “Little Earth”) of the Aether spacecraft. Pausing for her ritual contact with a photo of her daughter, Lucy, Sully prepares herself for another day observing data sent from the probes left around Jupiter, the goal of this historic and multiyear spaceflight to the planet. At the start of the return journey, the crew of the Aether was in a post-mission haze, in awe of the planet and their discoveries, and aware of humanity’s insignificance. As the other crewmembers (Harper, Ivanov, Thebes, and Devi) turned to their own duties, Sully felt newly “at peace” with having given up so much—most notably time with her family—to pursue her career. However, as the Aether got farther from Jupiter, reality began to dim the astronauts’ mood. Just prior to the Jovian survey, Mission Control on Earth went silent without warning. It has now been two weeks with no contact, and the silence is wearing on the crew. Without an audience, their work seems to lose significance. As they travel toward Earth, worry for their families, friends, and planet takes hold.
Sully, observing and taking notes on the Jovian data, considers the crewmembers’ different responses Earth’s silence. Ivanov spends more and more time in his lab, withdrawn and angry. Tal plays the video games he previously played with his sons from afar, working out his frustration through in-game failures and victories. Devi withdraws into quiet despair, spending less time interacting with others and missing equipment malfunctions when she works. Thebes and the captain, Harper, attempt to hold the crew together with optimism and the distraction of work or socialization. Sully, although somewhat distant, does her work in the communication pod and continues a friendly competition at cards with Harper.
Harper holds a crew meeting to discuss possible causes and solutions for the radio silence, but no one proposes plausible answers. At a loss, Harper and the crew agree to continue their normal work and monitor the situation. The next morning, Sully awakens to the simulated dawn but then returns to sleep, questioning the point of her work without anyone on Earth with which to share it.
Chapter 3 Summary
Wanting a longer walk than usual, Iris and Augie begin the trek to the observatory’s hangar armed with a flashlight and a rifle. Augie’s worsening arthritis causes him to struggle with the snowdrifts as he watches Iris bound ahead of him. The hanger is in a state of disarray, tools left scattered and the doors open in the crew’s haste to evacuate. The tools remind Augie of his father, recalling memories of the hunting trips Augie loathed.
Iris clambers along the fallen staircase as Augie discovers and tests two snow mobiles. As Augie looks back at Iris, he discovers her moving slowly toward a wolf, cooing and singing. Augie reacts in fear, shooting the wolf despite it softly lifting its snout toward Iris’s palm.
Augie hears Iris’s screaming and then her cries as she holds the dying wolf. In the face of her grief, Augie feels something unusual: “A primal taste, sour, like fear, rising in the back of his throat, or maybe loneliness. […] He felt everything, and the stars winked down on him: cold, bright, distant, unfeeling. […] [F]or the first time in so many years, he felt: helpless, lonely, afraid” (50-51). Together, they cover the wolf with snow to create a makeshift grave.
As they return to the observatory, Augie continues to feel his age, struggling to mount the steps to the control room and later contemplating his reflection, which looks older than he remembered. Iris goes to their living quarters, and Augie discovers a field guide Iris has been reading open to the entry on Arctic wolves. He reads old astrophysics journals to distract himself from both his feelings and Iris’s absence from the control room. He feels illness setting in with a pounding head and fever. Succumbing to sleep, he wonders what would happen to Iris if he died.
Chapter 4 Summary
Sully and the rest of the Aether’s crew slide further into despair, each of their responses to Earth’s silence pulling them further from one another and from their normal routines and tasks.
Sully, like the others, reminisces and worries. She thinks of Lucy and her exuberant presence in Sully’s earlier life, wishing she had kept more pictures or that Lucy or Lucy’s father, Jack, had sent her videos during the Aether’s trip. She recalls a pre-launch memory of Ivanov and his family sharing moments of joy over dinner; the memory sparks further parental guilt.
In week six of Earth’s silence, Ivanov and Tal’s increasing belligerence explodes in a brief fight. Harper and Thebes break up the fight, and as Sully calms and comforts Tal, she recalls the camaraderie the crew developed in their training for the Jovian mission. When Sully observes Devi pulling away from the crew, she climbs into Devi’s bunk, and the two women talk about Devi’s fears, Sully attempting to provide comfort.
At a loss and struggling to cope, Sully observes Thebes providing careful and patient guidance to the crew in ways best suited to each. Knowing Thebes lost his family in a car accident before the mission, Sully asks him how he doesn’t “go to pieces” (68), to which Thebes replies that he keeps the pieces separate and handles each one individually, thinking only of the moment he is in.
After becoming lost in another memory, this time of Harper and his introduction to the crew, Sully considers Thebes’s advice and attempts to follow it, thinking only of each moment or activity and putting aside her memories.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Chapters 1-4 set the stage for both the basic premise—a mysterious disaster on Earth that has cut off communications and isolated Augie in the Arctic and the crew of the Aether in space—and for the recurring theme of Time, Memory, and Redemption. These chapters establish that the primary conflict of the novel is emotional; rather than providing details about the cause or nature of Earth’s catastrophe, this science-fiction novel focuses on the personal experience of its characters, primarily Sully and Augie.
Augie’s physical isolation in the Arctic highlights the emotional isolation that he has rigidly enforced throughout the eight decades of his life. Forced, he believes, to look after the abandoned Iris, he resents the responsibility but attempts to provide what care he can. As Augie copes with The Effects of Parenting on Identity, he periodically finds that he feels grateful for Iris’s presence. The act of caring for Iris and the companionship she provides recall memories of his past, creating a sense of simultaneity as his thoughts alternate between past and present. Augie experiences this temporal interweaving viscerally as he recalls his missed opportunity for love with Jean and his child, as well as when his fevered dreams force him to relive his sins through the eyes of the many people he has hurt or neglected.
Sully’s experiences also involve struggles with parenting, similarly revealed via memory. Haunted by her feelings of failure as a mother and wife, Sully lapses into self-criticism as the joy and awe of the Jovian mission fades in response to Earth’s silence. In fact, the entire crew of the Aether falls into despair, triggered by worry over their home and memories of what may be lost. Harper and Thebes attempt to guide the rest of the crew, providing encouragement, comfort, and distraction as they can, but Sully observes each person falling deeper into despondency. Unable to connect with one another, many crewmembers either avoid one another or behave antagonistically, like Ivanov and Tal.
The character of Thebes provides an alternative approach to time and memory, focusing on staying in the “here and now.” Sully observes his calm in the face of potential catastrophe and an agonizing wait, contrasting it with the rest of the crew’s varying levels of anger, despair, and distraction. When she questions him about his equanimity, Thebes admits that his best strategy for coping is to stay present with whatever he is doing at any given moment: conducting repairs, reading, eating, or even brushing his teeth. Sully is skeptical of this strategy, but Thebes’s calm, caring interactions with the others persuade her to attempt such focus.
Nature is an important element of setting in Augie’s narrative. Despite Augie’s typical disconnection from anything but outer space, his thoughts illustrate new awareness of the natural world. The first hint comes with Augie’s contemplation of living like the polar bear he observes, with no thoughts other than what survival requires. The bear and nature begin to assert their role in Augie’s life despite his aversion to the hunting and fishing his father forced upon him. The dangers of the Arctic, including wolves and polar bears, drive Augie to take a gun on his and Iris’s walk to the hangar, but once he does shoot a wolf out of fear for Iris’s safety, he feels regret for what he says is the first time. Besides triggering further grief over his sins, this moment with the wolf, including Iris’s cries of despair over its body, begins to open Augie to the natural world around him.
