95 pages • 3 hours read
Erin MorgensternThe Starless Sea
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Fate and Free Will
The Starless Sea explores whether a story’s outcome, and its twists and turns, are fated by the story’s structure or determined by the free will of those in the story. Zachary’s preconceptions about the nature of fate are challenged both by his experiences and by Fate herself.
An Emerging Media student, Zachary acknowledges early on that gamers want the comfort of knowing that they exist within a greater narrative, but he does not accept that real-life humans want this same assurance in the external world. When he finds Sweet Sorrows and sees his own story, as the son of a fortune teller who bypassed a door to the Starless Sea, he wants to uncover the storyline laid out for him. He wants to have confidence in his actions because he knows his fate, and he wants someone else to blame should there be consequences. Mirabel—who, ironically, is the personification of fate—confronts this viewpoint directly: “You want to think that you did or that you were supposed to but you always had a choice […] You don’t do anything until someone or something else says you can” (346).
Zachary ultimately chooses to take the elevator into the Harbor because he, like all who enter the Starless Sea, is seeking. When they share a bottle of wine, Dorian toasts “to Seeking,” and Zachary toasts “to Finding.” To seek requires free will, but finding is never guaranteed; some may argue that fate plays a role in whether anything is found. Ultimately, Zachary learns to make his own decisions, discarding the page of the story that tells him what he does next and taking ownership of his own actions. Yet his freely chosen actions lead to his death, in accordance with Fate’s plan.
Although Zachary operates within the same guidelines he had idealized as a gamer—making choices within an established plan—he is displeased when that framework leads to his death just when his life—and his love for Dorian—is beginning. Fortunately, Fate (ironically, the person who argued most for Zachary to embrace free will) creates a happy ending for him. Once he has served his purpose, her heart is used to bring Zachary back from the dead and give him a beginning to his new story with Dorian.
The Nature of Reality
Meta-storytelling elements, such as the characters reading stories about themselves, blur the lines between reality and fantasy throughout The Starless Sea. Characters learn, through their stories, about a larger narrative of which they are a part, although they never completely know how the story will end.
The nonlinear nature of time within the Starless Sea makes reality difficult to pinpoint. The Keeper describes time as a stream with many inlets: People can enter and exit at any point, and characters like Simon and Eleanor unite even though they live hundreds of years apart. Zachary finds that Sweet Sorrows contains the story of his encounter with a door, even though the book was donated to the library four years before the story took place. In another timeline, when Eleanor tore pages from Sweet Sorrows, Zachary discovered pages missing in his present-day copy. External events changed the story within the realm of the Starless Sea: the Keating Foundation interfered to have Mirabel conceived outside of time. Characters can also speak new story into existence; when Eleanor found broken pieces of a ship, she put it together by simply speaking about how it should be done.
If it’s difficult to understand which events are real, it’s even more challenging to determine what they mean. Zachary and Kat debate the nature of meaning early on during a class on Innovative Storytelling. The proposal is made that the meaning of a story is both personal and variable, determined by the one experiencing the story, and what has meaning to one person may not have meaning to another. Mirabel tells Zachary that the Starless Sea will disappoint him because it will never measure up to what he imagined in his mind. She says Sweet Sorrows is an interpretation of reality, not a description of it.
When reality and meaning are impossible to determine objectively, characters anchor themselves in people and in relationships. As Zachary tells ice Mirabel when he recounts his story, his life felt empty and without meaning until he met Dorian. The meaning of reality—the very nature of reality—may be as subjective as a story written by someone else. As such, “Not all stories speak to all listeners, but all listeners can find a story that does, somewhere, sometime. In one form or another” (187).
Endings and Beginnings
Endings are usually considered finite and concrete, disallowing any new action. In The Starless Sea, however, events that appear to be endings only pivot into a new line of story, both in each character’s individual story and in the overall story. Mirabel and The Keeper’s story is repeated again and again, with each taking on different physical forms throughout. The Starless Sea absorbs the realm above it when Zachary brings the current story to its end, only to begin again when Kat finds a new Harbor to enter.
When it becomes clear that the story within the Starless Sea is seeking its own end, the characters find themselves in an existential crisis, left to wonder what will happen next. They wonder whether their lives will continue if the story ends, what will matter if the story is over, and whether there will be any existence for them at all. Their understanding of stories make them think that endings are permanent, but even when Zachary dies, his life doesn’t end—nor does it end the second time, when the Starless Sea absorbs the in-between.
Mirabel once told Kat that endings are what give stories their meaning; Allegra once told Eleanor that all endings are truly beginnings. In the Afterward, Mirabel gives the moon a demonstration of a magic trick: There is a card with void and ending on one side and expansion and beginning on the other. She shows both sides before the card dissolves into gold dust, just like the egg representing the story in the potential guardian trials. Just like the many lifetimes of Mirabel, the end is not the end, it is only a change; and after all, stories are change. “The world is strange and endings are not truly endings no matter how the stars might wish it so” (73).
