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.
Character Analysis
Iris “Sully” Sullivan
Iris Sullivan, called “Sully” by all of the characters, is the protagonist of the Aether’s narrative arc. Sully’s primary workstation on board the Aether is the communication pod, where she gathers data received from the Jovian probes and eventually scans radio frequencies from Earth in an attempt to find evidence of remaining life.
Sully’s primary arc is emotional, involving both her struggles with Human and Environmental Connection and her guilt over having pursued her passion rather than being a traditional mother. Trapped in memory like the rest of the crew, Sully recalls her early childhood as the only daughter of a highly intelligent single mother and scientist, Jean, whom Sully remembers idolizing. However, Sully’s memories of her mother are tinged with grief due to the loss she felt when Jean married Sully’s stepfather and devoted herself to the full-time parenting of Sully’s half siblings. Even before her mother’s passing, Sully felt alone in the world.
Sully’s memories also center on her own child, Lucy, and her ex-husband, Jack. Her ritual of touching Lucy’s photo every morning illustrates the depth of Sully’s love for her daughter, but self-recrimination plagues her. Sully always dreamed of being an astronaut, and landing a spot on the Jovian mission was the pinnacle of her career. Despite this achievement, Sully feels she failed as a mother and wife, putting her career above time with her own child, who began to resent Sully and gravitate toward her stepmother.
Coming from this background, Sully alternates between reaching out to her crewmates and pulling away from their attempts at connection. It is only as they reach Earth that she finally accepts her choices and her current reality. Acknowledging her feelings for Harper and finding peace with the fact that all her choices, whether failures or successes, led her to this moment, Sully finds herself able to connect more deeply as she, Harper, and Tal return to Earth.
Augustine “Augie” Lofthouse
Augie, the other protagonist of Good Morning, Midnight, is Sully’s absent father. Emotionally stunted by the effects of his mother’s mental illness and a strained and at times combative relationship with his father, Augie developed into a man preoccupied with his work as an astrophysicist. To the extent that he interacted with others, he did so as an “experiment,” playing with the emotions of the women he dated.
The novel opens with Augie, now in his seventies, having chosen to remain at an Arctic observatory when the Air Force evacuated the facility due to a mysterious impending disaster. Shortly after the evacuation, Augie discovered a young child, a girl named Iris, whom he assumed was left behind in the chaos. Unable to contact anyone from the outside world, he began to care for her; at first, he resents the responsibility, but he eventually learns to love Iris and put her needs above his own, illustrating The Effects of Parenting on Identity. His relationship with Iris is his primary character arc, alongside facing his shame over his past.
Near the end of his life, Augie realizes the truth of Iris’s existence—that he imagined her. She is his daughter as she appeared in the only image he ever saw of her. His mind conjured her while grappling with his past; imagining her as a real girl allowed him to manifest the love and desire for connection that he suppressed his whole life. His subconscious takes physical form, allowing him to earn redemption by living out the life he ran from as a younger man.
Iris
Iris, Augie’s imagined version of Sully, is both a symbol and a character in her own right. She often seems like a flat character, speaking rarely and seeming almost a shadow in Augie’s life. Early on, she mostly appears reading, walking beside Augie, or singing her low, wind-like song. She takes clearer shape as Augie opens up to human connection and the role of caretaker and father. He imagines her as excited and carefree in their life at Lake Hazen, where she learns fishing and cooking from him, brings him bouquets of wildflowers, and drums a beat against the boat to accompany her singing. Iris develops a more rounded personality the more Augie cares for her, paralleling the ways that Augie’s own personality grows as he learns to engage with another human being in a more empathetic manner.
The Crew of the Aether: Harper, Devi, Tal, and Ivanov
The Aether’s crewmembers are, for the most part, flat characters, existing as foils or triggers to highlight and push forward Sully’s narrative arc. However, Lily Brooks-Dalton provides each of them with moments of depth.
Harper is both the captain of the crew and a quiet romantic interest for Sully. An experienced astronaut and a competent, charismatic leader, he attempts to bolster the crew’s spirits and keep them distracted from Earth’s silence with work and recreation. His love for Sully is repeatedly hinted at, but Sully only recognizes it fully when Devi identifies it. By the time he, Sully, and Tal descend to Earth in the Soyuz pod, Sully has accepted her feelings for Harper, and they share mutual gratitude for the other’s presence as they return to an uncertain home.
Devi, one of two crew members in charge of repairs and maintenance, struggles most with Earth’s silence. She falls into a deep depression, spending much time alone in her bunk and overlooking ship malfunctions even when she does work. She becomes a sort of surrogate daughter for Sully, who attempts to comfort and cheer the younger woman. Devi briefly comes out of her cloud of depression to complete repair work on the antenna with Sully, but she is too absorbed in her task to notice a suit malfunction, leading to her death.
Tal is a regular figure in Little Earth because of the obsession he develops with video games—a coping mechanism to ease his worries. He spent the journey to Jupiter playing those games to bond with his sons back home, and when the crew loses contact with Earth, he buries himself deeper in the games as a distraction.
Ivanov works primarily in the lab, and as news from Earth ceases, he preoccupies himself with work and responds to the rest of the crew with anger and distance. His photo-plastered bunk reminds Sully of how bare her own bunk is and thus how “bad” a parent she considers herself. Ivanov himself provides more nuanced insight into Sully’s experience, noting that family cannot understand a calling like theirs.
