Good Morning, Midnight

Good Morning, Midnight
Rhys, Jean
London : Deutsch, 1967
189 p. ; 21 cm

The last (1939) of the early group of four novels, Good Morning, Midnight, is the most formally complex: first person narrative in the present tense, modified use of stream of consciousness, sharp structural shifts. The female protagonist, Sasha Jansen, is the familiar socially marginal lone female of the earlier novels, whose existence is almost as precarious as those of the earlier protagonists, but she is older, more experienced and far less naïve. Her return to Paris after a near breakdown in London marks the evolution of Sasha as a woman capable of love. The ending of the novel, “yes – yes – yes…”, so reminiscent of the ending of Joyce’s Ulysses, however positive, cannot gainsay Sasha’s grim journey through those meanest of Parisian streets and deepest of alcoholic depths. These four early novels establish Rhys as a great artist of modern urban anomie, of the savagery and exploitation of the modern city, most especially as it renders lone women isolate and vulnerable.

H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Studies
University of Illinois at Chicago Library
Daley Library - Special Collections/3rd floor (non-circ.)
PR9275.D653 R59 1967

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