Memory, Loss, and Change Theme Analysis

With its many flashbacks and its disorganized timeline, Good Morning, Midnight is a novel about memory and its impact on the present. More specifically, the book explores the difficulties of moving on from past hardships. There’s nothing particularly troubling about Sasha’s current circumstances, considering that she has enough money to get by, a place to stay, and no obligations keeping her from enjoying Paris. But she’s still miserable because she can’t stop delving into painful memories, frequently thinking about her disastrous relationship with Enno—a relationship that led to the birth of their son, who died shortly thereafter. Given her personal history, it’s no wonder that she’s unhappy, though she exacerbates her own discontent by frequently succumbing to vivid flashbacks, as if she can’t firmly ground herself in the present. For Sasha, it seems, her current life is hard to process because she’s still working through the loss of her son (and, for that matter, the loss of her true love, Enno). At the same time, she’s living through a period of significant societal change, as she and everyone around her adjust to life after World War I. For many, the post-war years were defined by a sense of relative aimlessness, as people celebrated the end of the war but didn’t necessarily know what to do next, perhaps because they still carried the trauma of having lived through one of the bloodiest wars in history. Although Sasha isn’t all that hung up on World War I, the way her painful memories interfere with her present life aligns with her generation’s broader struggle to make sense of their lives in the aftermath of a horrific war. In this way, the novel highlights just how hard it is to move on from a traumatic past, even if nothing (no matter how devastating) will ever stop the world from continuing like normal.

Memory is an ominous and powerful force in the novel, as Sasha frequently succumbs to grief after suddenly remembering something about her past. Even the book’s structure emphasizes her inability to ignore her memories. For example, although she tells herself not to walk around Paris while thinking, “Here this happened, here that happened,” that’s exactly what she ends up doing. When she passes places that she and Enno used to visit in Paris, she often falls headlong into very specific memories of her time in the city with him. These flashbacks happen so abruptly that it’s often a bit hard for readers to track the novel’s narrative thread, creating a disjointed effect. The disorienting nature of these cascading flashbacks perfectly illustrates Sasha’s own powerlessness when it comes to memory; unable to keep these memories locked away in her mind, she finds it difficult to ground herself in the present, and the novel’s shifting narrative structure reflects her inability to move on from the past.

Of course, it’s because Sasha’s memories are so heavy and overpowering that she can’t quite leave them behind. She feels as if her memories themselves are a kind of vast, frightening darkness. For her, thinking about the past is like falling into a bottomless pit: “You are walking along a road peacefully,” she narrates. “You trip. You fall into blackness. That’s the past[.]” According to this viewpoint, the past is like a fathomless darkness that, once entered, is hard to escape. In many ways, it’s understandable that Sasha can’t escape her memories, since they include the death of her newborn baby—an undoubtedly traumatic event that obviously impacted Sasha in profound ways. But because her baby died and Enno left, it’s almost as if this devastating loss never even happened—as if these two people never existed. What’s more, the midwife who cared for Sasha expertly wrapped her in bandages after she gave birth, so she doesn’t even have any scars from childbirth. In a sense, then, Sasha’s memories are the only things she has left from her short-lived time as a mother and a wife. Although these memories are frightening and emotionally debilitating, letting go of them would mean letting go of a piece of herself that she’s not ready to part with.

On a broader level, Sasha’s struggle to reconcile her painful past with her current life has a lot in common with her generation’s attempt to move on from the harrowing experience of World War I. The young adults who lived during and after the war were known as the Lost Generation, largely because many of them were aimless and wayward in the years following the conflict. Like Sasha, the soldiers who survived the war were tasked with remaking their lives after enduring intense trauma. At the same time, the rest of the world went along like normal, undergoing all kinds of change. But for soldiers scarred by their time in battle, moving on from the war would mean leaving behind important, life-altering experiences, even if those experiences were horrifying and terrible. Sasha faces the same dilemma—nothing about her current circumstances aligns with her sorrowful past, and this discrepancy puts her in a tricky position. If she invests herself in the present, she’ll have to let go of experiences that were important and formative, but if she clings too tightly to those memories, she’ll never be able to fully live in the present. By outlining this problem, the novel shows how hard it is to live with the burden of painful memories, using Sasha’s experience to shed light on the wider emotional challenges that the Lost Generation faced after World War I.