Sasha spends her days in a simple hotel room in Paris. She’s familiar with small, dim rooms like this one, though it’s been a while since she last lived in Paris. She was previously living in London and trying to drink herself to death, but a friend couldn’t bear to see her in such a depressing state, so she lent her money and urged her to go to Paris, thinking she needed a change. Going through life unnoticed, in Sasha’s mind, is an impossibility. In her return visit to Paris, she feels as though she is always recognized when re-entering her old haunts. Given her paranoidal instincts, this is probably a false assessment. However, in her mind, a trip to a favorite restaurant dissolves into a nightmare of humiliation. Good Morning, Midnight’s ending gives room for much critical interpretation. Castro straightforwardly argues, “Sasha, rejecting and rejected by a man she could love, willingly receives her tormentor, a hostile, frightening man from the next room, in a sexual embrace” (21). Emery informs that while some see the act of “Sasha’s welcoming embrace of the nightmarish commis . . . as a welcome to death,” others see “suggestions of rebirth through transcendence of the self in union with another human being” (145-146). Carr, Helen. 1996. Jean Rhys (Plymouth: Northcote House)— 2003. ‘Jean Rhys: West Indian Intellectual’ in Bill Schwarz, ed., West Indian Intellectuals in Britain(Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 93-113

Good Morning, Midnight Character Analysis | LitCharts Good Morning, Midnight Character Analysis | LitCharts

Thanks to Michele's contribution to this discussion of the book, I read this wonderful paper by Gina Maria Tomasulo Out of the Deep Dark River which compares Good Morning, Midnight to Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground: Sasha responds strangely to the Exhibition, being transfixed in a moment of aesthetic rapture by its ‘cold, empty’ beauty. There is an intense sense of isolation in Sasha’s response which nevertheless involves strong desire. Despite and because of René’s company her encounter with the Exhibition is hers alone. She is spurred to go to it by René’s anti-Semitic remarks about Russians in Paris: ‘Jews and poor whites’, says the gigolo, ‘The most boring people in the world. Terrible people’. Sasha responds, This sense of not belonging uproots her ability to stay fixed in the present, and so she must greet her own Midnight again – the past. Rhys’ intimate meditations on the “improbable truths” and hypocrisies of life bring about sharp observations on the dynamics among classes and the correlation between physical spaces and social decline towards the complete annulation of the self. Good Morning, Midnight does not offer the reader much sense of hope. We are so firmly entrenched within Sasha’s consciousness that it is hard to see outside of her experience. We drown alongside her as she struggles to stay afloat of all her routines – those self-imposed and not. The past has a powerful pull. At the beginning of the novel, we hear the following:

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I am surrounded by the pictures … Now the room expands and the iron band round my heart loosens. The miracle has happened. I am happy. the inner subjective life of her protagonists never seems to be reconciled with the diktats of the given world. Much of her inventiveness as a writer derives from her capacities to craft a narrative which in itself dramatises and makes evident the workings of these discrepant realities – social and subjective – in all their textured, phenomenological everydayness. Or was she another victim of straddling two worlds, the inner and the outer, two cultures, two expectations, hers and the other that society nursed on her since her birth? Would I be able to penetrate her loneliness, through the darkness of our hopelessness felt together. His second goodbye is final and Sasha’s mind, already teetering on the edge of insanity, begins its slow, unavoidable journey to self-destruction. “Did I love Enno at the end? Did he ever love me? I don’t know. Only, it was after that that I began to go to pieces. Not all at once, of course. First this happened, and then that happened” (143).

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys | Waterstones

Sasha holds no illusions about the young man. René, as Emery writes, “wants Sasha’s money; he wants to use her sexually” (165). They meet again and, despite Sasha’s resistance, the gigolo breaks her down for good. After a night of verbal sparring, Sasha finally reveals to René why she is so afraid of living:There was another section in this book that I did a lot of thinking about. Sasha was only 25 years old - single - she saw herself too thin, dirty and haggard. Her clothes were shabby, her shoes were worn out, she had circles under her eyes and her hair was straight and lanky. She was so incredibly critical of herself. Sasha DID experience suffering from loss and tragedy ..... Funny, sad and unforgettable, the story Let Them Call it Jazz is Rhys’s unique contribution to the vision of London as seen by the Caribbean newcomers who settled in bedsits and boarding houses around Notting Hill during the postwar years. Narrator Selina Davis shares Rhys’s own grim experiences of prison, poverty and loneliness. Her voice is a powerful one – you don’t doubt Selina when she says: “Believe me, if I aim at your wife I hit your wife – that’s certain.”

Good Morning, Midnight Themes | LitCharts Good Morning, Midnight Themes | LitCharts

Recalling the conversation with Mr. Blank, when asked about her previous job, Sasha refers to herself as a mannequin. This is a fitting term for someone attempting to drift through life unnoticed. It also associates itself perfectly with Sasha’s description of invisibility: vacant and neutral. Mannequins fill department store windows, dressed to the nine’s with the latest fashions. Yet, all of the figures are exactly alike. The eyes, nose, lips, the contour of the face—lifeless; the body, stiff and disposable—all the same. Sasha literally wants to experience life as a mannequin would; which is to say, she wants to feel nothing at all. Paris, ca. 1930 It seems appropriate to end with the poem for which this novel is named. It’s worth reading it alongside the novel: Issacharoff, Jess. 2013. ‘“No Pride, No Name, No Face, No Country”:Jewishness and National Identity in Good Morning, Midnight’ in Mary Wilson, ed., Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 111-129 Mental illness? Depression? Alcoholism? What shelf should I put this under? Bleak? All in all, not a pretty story, but fascinating in its way, fast-paced, written in a stream-of-consciousness format. Its deep psychological insight kept my attention all the way through. Yes, she cries. But Jean tries too, at least intermittently, once in a while, getting ready to go to that so-hard to hold job, that appointment for something she can’t remember what or why …Although in 1937 only a symbolic triumph, within a little over a year after the novel was published in April 1939, Paris would submit to the German occupation. Another passage that tells us more about the terrible mental state she is in: “People talk about the happy life, but that’s the happy life when you don’t care any longer if you live or die.”