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 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Bedridden by illness, Augie experiences feverish dreams and memories. He observes himself, young and attractive, pursuing women or studying the skies. The atmosphere is tropical and warm, like many of the places to which he once fled for both escape and research. After seeing himself admired and sought after, both academically and sexually, Augie observes a change in the dreams. He now sees his teenage self, watching his mother being taken to a psychiatric hospital and then his lonely life with his father. He sees versions of his own face, revealing the hurt he has caused and triggering shame:
[O]ver and over, from behind the eyes of women he’d abused, colleagues he’d cheated, servers and bellhops and assistants and lab techs he’d neglected, slighted, always too busy and ambitious to pay attention to anyone but himself (77).
Augie wakes as the fever passes. Iris has been caring for him for five days. As he recovers, he begins rebuilding his strength by walking around the observatory and out in the snow. Despite the physical exertion, Augie cannot work the “joy of survival and the weight of regret” out of his body (80).
On their first longer walk since his illness, Augie spots a polar bear on the horizon—the same one he previously observed, he is certain. Augie imagines being the bear, and as the bear looks at him, Augie imagines a “strange kinship” of loneliness, longing, and doom. Augie’s perspective changes as he observes the bear and feels Iris’s presence, leaving him grateful for companionship rather than solitude.
Augie wonders what will happen to Iris when he dies. Recalling his childhood obsession and skill with radios, which he developed after his mother’s hospitalization, he decides to search the radio waves again in an attempt to reach someone outside the Arctic and to guarantee a future for Iris.
Chapter 6 Summary
Sully, disappointed after yet another scanning of silent radio frequencies, reflects on the ways her priorities have shifted since Earth stopped communicating with the Aether. At the beginning of the flight, Sully valued the importance of the probes the crew were to place around Jupiter; now, with potentially no one on Earth left to learn about their mission results, Sully questions the significance of their work.
Sully returns to Little Earth and accepts Harper’s invitation to play a round of cards, but she first checks on Devi in the bunks. They share a laugh over Ivanov’s grumpiness, but acknowledging the fear that underlies his behavior reminds Devi of her own despair. Sully leaves at Devi’s request, returning to the proposed game with Harper.
Despite her intention to stay in the moment, the card game reminds Sully of her mother and the day she taught Sully how to play solitaire while Sully was waiting in her mother’s office. A glance at Harper brings Sully back to the present, where she attempts to read him. They share reminiscences of their pasts, and Sully recalls her mother, Jean, being intelligent and loving but increasingly distant from Sully after she remarried and had twins—Sully’s half siblings. As they continue to play, Sully creates an imagined history for Harper, imagining his first two loves but missing the clues of Harper’s developing love for her.
The next day begins normally for the astronauts: Thebes fixes a temperature control problem that Devi missed, Tal monitors the asteroid field to avoid collisions, and Sully checks her equipment in the communication pod. A loud noise interrupts Sully’s contemplations, and she looks out the cupola to see that their main communications dish has broken off from the ship and is floating away.
Chapter 7 Summary
Augie wakes one morning and, finding Iris nowhere in the observatory, looks outside. There, he sees her sitting in only her long underwear. He races to her in concern, but upon checking her extremities, he finds her surprisingly warm and healthy despite the freezing temperatures and lack of adequate clothing.
Iris is fascinated by the musk oxen, pointing them out excitedly to Augie. Recovering from his worry, Augie urges her to return to the observatory, where he completes one final check of her extremities for frostbite. Finding none, he begins to question his perceptions and sanity. As he completes Iris’s health, he recognizes how matted her hair has become and combs it, trimming anything he cannot untangle.
The two continue their daily routines, Iris reading everything she can find and Augie futilely scanning radio frequencies. Augie realizes as he works with the radios that Iris’s presence is what helps him continue, “keep[ing] him striving without rational expectation of success. It was possible, he mused, that she was what had kept him alive this long” (118).
As he scans frequencies during a sleepless night, Augie flips through one of the Arctic atlases and finds the map of Lake Hazen. He recalls other researchers going there for fishing trips during their vacations, as well as the presence of a seasonal weather station on the edge of the lake. Thinking he needs a change and that he and Iris could use an adventure, Augie plans for a trip to Lake Hazen.
Chapter 8 Summary
The astronauts gather in Little Earth after the loss of their communications dish. Ivanov expresses anger at Tal, whom he assumes missed a nearby asteroid that hit the Aether. Harper urges the crew to avoid blame and instead discuss ways to solve the problem.
As the crew settles on a resolution—creating a new antenna—Sully observes a sense of renewed purpose in each of the astronauts. Devi, about whom Sully has particularly worried, comes out of her fog to participate in the repairs.
During the work, Sully sees Ivanov’s bunk through an opening in the curtain. The walls are nearly covered with photos of his family, and when he sees her looking, they discuss their families. The two bond over having loved ones who do not understand their calling as astronauts.
Harper, struggling with his decision, admits to Sully that she and Devi are best suited for the space walk to replace the antenna. Devi tells Sully separately that Harper is concerned for Sully because he is in love with her, a fact that Sully has not admitted to herself. As she reflects on the mission ahead and Devi’s words, Sully considers whether she returns (or could return) Harper’s feelings but quickly pushes the thoughts aside.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
The theme of Time, Memory, and Redemption continues to play a major role in Chapters 5-8. Augie’s fevered dreams of his past begin the process of his reckoning with the variety of ways he has hurt others. Before he can earn redemption, Augie must first recognize his sins and see himself through the eyes of his victims. Augie has spent his entire life running from responsibility, ignoring the feelings of others, and suppressing his own feelings, including shame and regret. After the visceral replaying of his past, however, Augie can no longer run. He attempts to suppress the feelings his memories stirred up, but no amount of physical exertion erases them.
Following Thebes’s advice, Sully also attempts to avoid the despairing pull of memory and is able to reach out to Devi. The Effects of Parenting on Identity play a subtle role in this interaction, as Sully attempts to console and listen to the younger woman almost as a mother would. Though Sully feels she has failed as a mother, her conversation with Devi illustrates her capacity to care for others and her instinct to love.
Despite this moment of connection, Sully again lapses into memory during the card game with Harper. This time her thoughts center on her mother, who taught her to play solitaire so that she could entertain herself while Sully’s mother Jean was working. These memories illustrate one of Sully’s most important relationships and reveal how hurt she was when her mother pulled away after remarrying and having further children. Feeling abandoned, Sully isolated herself from others. Her mother’s role in this self-isolation was in fact twofold, as it was her influence and encouragement that helped Sully develop her own interests and intellect. Unlike Jean, Sully chose to pursue her dream rather than wrapping herself in the trappings of domesticity, but she perceives this choice as in conflict with her own role as a mother. Sully—like Augie—uses work to avoid personal intimacy.
Earth’s silence reveals Sully and Augie’s work for the coping mechanism that it is. It is not so much that work replaces human interaction as that it allows them to control it; in sharing their research with an audience, they present carefully crafted images of themselves rather than expressing vulnerability. The absence of even that form of connection fuels Sully’s increasing sense of her work’s meaninglessness and contributes to her desperation to contact someone via the radio. Augie’s desire for Human and Environmental Connection is even more acute. Worried about what will happen to Iris when he dies, he seeks out contact on her behalf, illustrating how his parental role is making him less self-centered. Notably, Iris also actively nudges him toward greater connection, as when she points out the musk oxen; bolstered by his confrontation with his past (Augie reflects that there seems to be “more” of Iris following his illness), his subconscious encourages him to reach out to his surroundings. He soon begins to desire this contact, and as he reviews old maps, he recalls the presence of a weather station on Lake Hazen—one with a much stronger radio than that of the observatory. This inspires his suggestion to trek to Lake Hazen, which proves a major plot development.
These chapters also set up a major conflict for the crew of the Aether: the destruction of the communication satellite and their mission to repair it. It’s unclear what broke the satellite off from the ship, but without it, the crew cannot communicate with Earth even if a connection is reestablished. Despite the dire situation, having a problem to solve reinvigorates the crew. Tal and Ivanov are less antagonistic, Devi is active and mentally engaged, and the crew as a whole exhibits the type of camaraderie Sully recalls from their days preparing for the mission in Houston. For both Augie and the crew of the Aether, the return of hope and purpose sets the stage for a new mission—Lake Hazen and the space walk, respectively—and further attempts to reach the outside world.
