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 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Iris and Augie spend two weeks enjoying the bounty of Lake Hazen and the weather station. Augie avoids the radio shed, unwilling as yet to hear things he doesn’t want to learn about the outside world. The food stores are so large and varied that the pair can create fresh meals, and Augie rediscovers the pleasure of baking, something he did as a child whenever his mother left baking projects unfinished.
For the first time, Augie experiences the lengthening days and flowering hills of the Arctic during spring. Previously, he flew to southern retreats during the summer, when the long Arctic days left him with no night sky to observe. Now, Augie enjoys leisure time as he watches Iris run around the shore. His joy reminds him of the closest he ever came to happiness previously, during his time with Jean. His current contentment is tinged with regret as he remembers Jean’s words to him: “You’re so broken, she’d said. I wish you weren’t so broken” (183).
With more sunlight and warmer temperatures, Augie also enjoys less painful joints and increased energy. For the first time, he observes the midnight sun—the long Arctic summer days when the sun never sets.
Without an outside world to communicate with, Augie and Iris enjoy the simple pleasures of the natural world. As the lake melts, Augie takes Iris out on the boat and teaches her to fish. They enjoy freshly caught fish for dinner, and afterwards, Augie watches the musk oxen as they search for food in the shallows. A smile lights his face—an expression so unfamiliar that he touches it with his fingers to “be sure he was doing it right” (191).
Chapter 14 Summary
Sully distracts herself by working to get the communication system back online. Back in Little Earth, the crew holds a brief memorial for Devi. As Sully looks around at her crewmates, she realizes that despite her long-standing loneliness, these people have become her family.
Sully spends her time searching for radio frequencies from Earth, hoping to find contact of some kind. She briefly returns to Little Earth but claims she forgot something in the communication room rather than accept an invitation to play cards. Still scanning frequencies, she discovers sounds from the unmanned Voyager 3. Returning to her bunk, she admits to Harper that she simply wanted to be alone. She falls asleep, dreaming that she is nestled within the parabolic dish of Voyager 3, moving further and further toward the end of the universe.
The next day, the crew gathers to review their progress and what they can do moving forward. They are approaching Mars and agree to continue their work until they can find out more about Earth. Sully allows her work in the communication pod to soothe and distract her from her memories and sorrow. As she scans, she hopes for a response and gives herself permission to look toward the future.
Chapter 15 Summary
Augie and Iris continue their routine on Lake Hazen, cooking, fishing, and exploring at their leisure. Augie is content to remain ignorant of the outside world, but whenever he sees the radio hut, he recalls the new fact of his life: “His own happiness wasn’t the most important thing to him anymore” (204). He recognizes that as the temperatures cools in the coming months, his joint pains and illnesses will return.
With this in mind, he makes his way to the radio hut at long last. Getting the machinery started, he begins a scan, as he had at the observatory, hoping that the further reach of these radios will allow him to contact someone. Iris comes in to remind him that they should fish, and he takes a break. He returns to the radio daily, however, continuing his search as the summer fades, the stars appear again, and Augie’s body weakens in the cold.
On his way to the shed one day, he sees the tracks of a polar bear—he assumes the same one—and is surprised that it came this far, perhaps following them. Putting the bear out of his mind, he scans the airwaves again.
This time, Augie hears something. At first it is faint, but as he waits, he hears a woman’s voice.
Chapter 16 Summary
Sully continues her search for life through Earth’s radio waves, once again distant from the rest of the crew as the communication repairs fade and Earth’s silence drags on. They begin to see landmarks indicating Earth’s closeness: The International Space Station and the moon. As they lose contact with one of their Jovian probes, their attention focuses further on their home planet.
Despite the stress of Earth’s continued silence, Sully is glad to observe less animosity and more camaraderie between Ivanov and Tal. She feels ambushed, however, when she finds Harper waiting for her in the communication pod, attempting to pull her out of herself and check in on her. She maintains a brusque distance. Feeling ashamed, she afterwards considers their situation and suddenly feels helpless, as if nothing could help them now, and as if nothing could have prevented their current situation. Harper is distant when she encounters him later, which she takes as her penance.
During a radio scan as the Aether passes the moon, Sully realizes she has been muttering into the radio, willing someone to hear her. Suddenly she hears a faint voice responding, and she initiates contact.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
As Augie and Iris enjoy Lake Hazen, the theme of Time, Memory, and Redemption continues to haunt the narrative, illustrating the ways that redemption often exists alongside grief. Augie experiences a new lightness, beginning to smile and feel peace and joy, but this joy is tinged with sadness as he considers his past—in particular, Jean’s remark that he was “broken” when he explained that he couldn’t be a father. Augie’s journey suggests that such grief and shame are essential to earning redemption: Redemption requires recognizing one’s sins, so the life of someone who has earned forgiveness must necessarily be tinged with sadness. Joy and sorrow exist in harmony, which Augie begins to revel in. As a product of Augie’s imagination, Iris too reveals more personality than ever before, becoming light, silly, and joyful to match Augie’s growing feelings.
Human and Environmental Connection also inflects Sully’s storyline. Despite her ongoing struggle to connect with her crewmates or to accept their overtures of friendship and vulnerability, she realizes that the crew is her family. She struggled to be a mother in the ways society expected, but she was not alone, as she thought. Sully’s crewmates understand her in ways her biological family could not, and she now begins to accept this reality. Nevertheless, she hurts Harper when she pushes him away. Sully exhibits more self-awareness than Augie’s past self, but she is similar to her father in that she cannot seem to express warmth and vulnerability with others. Like Augie, she has been on a path to redemption, reaching out to Devi and others and providing care despite her presumed failures as a mother. Loss briefly interrupts this process, miring her in grief. Sully’s response—burying herself in her self-appointed task of scanning the airwaves—is a now familiar behavioral pattern, but when the ship loses contact with one of the Jovian probes, it leaves Sully with less work. Without this coping mechanism, she becomes preoccupied with the world they left behind and her regrets about her previous life.
Augie drives the plot forward after weeks of enjoying Lake Hazen with Iris by finally going to the radio hut. Driven by The Effects of Parenting on Identity, Augie recognizes that despite his better health lately, the cold of fall and winter will bring returned pains to his aging body. Concerned for Iris’s future, he starts his scan for life. Iris reminds him to enjoy life despite his renewed attempts at contact, and the pair continue to connect through fishing, cooking, and exploring. Most importantly, Augie begins to reconnect with himself. He uses the station’s stockpile to create delicious meals, and he bakes, which reminds himself of how he would complete his mother’s projects as a child. Despite the tinge of sadness he feels for his mother, he recalls enjoying baking—both the action and the end results.
As the climax of the story approaches, Augie and Sully meet over the airwaves. Although neither recognizes their relationship to one another, their narratives have brought them to a place where they can connect as they could not when Sully was a child. The seemingly unlikely meeting between father and daughter, which the entire novel has in fact been building toward, seems almost predestined in a way that underscores the emphasis on connection: Both Sully and Augie are part of something much bigger than themselves.
