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Summary: The Penultimate Update Nora Had Posted Before She Found Herself Between Life and Death
In Nora’s second to last social media post before she tries to end her life, she writes about a metaphorical maze that she’s lost in and how she can’t seem to find any happiness. She notes that everyone else who has made it out of the maze is happy and laughing. She also says that her cat died.
Summary: The Chessboard
Mrs. Elm is sitting at a table in the library, playing chess against herself. Nora says that her life with Dan at the pub isn’t what she thought it would be. Mrs. Elm muses that it’s hard to predict what will make people happy in life. Nora is worried about the Nora in the pub life and what her experience will be. Mrs. Elm says she’ll remember everything that Nora from the root life did and said as though she herself had done it. Nora says she still wants to die, and she doesn’t have the energy to keep trying out new lives. Mrs. Elm says the word want suggests a lack, and she wonders if there’s a life in which Nora really wants to live. Nora wants to see the life in which she kept Volts inside so that Volts didn’t die on the street.
Summary: The Only Way to Learn is to Live
Nora goes to the life in which she kept Volts as an indoor cat. It’s very similar to her root life. When she finds Volts, he’s dead under her bed. She’s deeply upset with Mrs. Elm when she quickly returns to the library. Mrs. Elm tells her that there’s no life in which Volts lives because Volts had a severe heart problem, and that he lived the longest in the life she visited. She tells Nora that the time Volts had with Nora was the best year of his life. When Nora goes to The Book of Regrets, she sees that the regret about being a better pet owner to Volts fades away. Mrs. Elm emphasizes that regrets sometimes have no basis in fact. She tells Nora that the only way to learn is to live.
Nora is still very upset and refuses to go to another life. They just sit there, but Nora gets too bored to continue being stubborn. She wonders what happens if she visits a life in which she’s already dead. Though Nora can die in any life she visits, Mrs. Elm tells her that the only lives in the books on the shelves are the ones in which she’s still alive. Nora decides to visit the life in which she decided to go with Izzy to Australia.
Summary: Fire
Nora finds herself swimming in a saltwater pool. She wonders if this is what she does every morning in this life. She wanders around the town, seeing that she lives in Bronte Beach, which is a different area of Australia than the one she was supposed to go to with Izzy. She wonders where Izzy is and if they have a happy life together. She sees a very sad poem she’s posted on Instagram called “Fire.” She finds her way to her flat and meets her pot-smoking, video-game-playing roommate, who is not Izzy. The roommate tells her that Izzy died. Nora looks it up online and finds that Izzy died in a car crash on her way to Nora’s birthday party. Nora experiences immense grief and leaves the Australian life.
Summary: Fish Tank
Upon her return to the library, Nora is upset, and Mrs. Elm points out that it’s very hard to predict the outcome of choices. She tells Nora that after Izzy died, the Nora in that life got stuck in depression. Nora wonders if she gets stuck in every life. Mrs. Elm encourages her to keep trying. Nora decides to go further back and visit the life she would have lived if she had stuck with swimming when she was a teenager as her father wanted her to.
Summary: The Last Update Nora Had Posted Before She Found Herself Between Life and Death
In her final social media post before she tried to kill herself, Nora says she misses her cat and that she’s tired.
Analysis
This section introduces the game of chess as a symbol for the unpredictable nature of life and of the outcomes of choices. When Nora returns from the pub life, Mrs. Elm is playing chess, just as she was in the high school library when Nora found out that her father died. Thus, from the very beginning of the novel, chess is intertwined with the staggering unpredictability of life. The first three lives that Nora visits are unexpected in some way. Her cat is surprisingly dead in all lives, and her best friend died as a result of Nora moving to Australia. When Nora returns to the Midnight Library between these lives, she finds Mrs. Elm at the chessboard playing a game against herself. This suggests that it is difficult to know what move an opponent will make, even if that opponent is oneself. In the same way, Nora learns that it’s difficult to predict what decisions will make her future self either happy or filled with grief. Like a series of intertwined chess moves, each one dependent on the other, the choices a person makes in life can lead to unexpected wins and losses.
This section explores the theme of the uncertainty inherent in life. In her first three visits to new lives, Nora learns quickly that what she anticipates will happen is often thwarted. Her relatively simple wish—to visit the life in which her cat might be alive—reveals that no such reality exists. Though this lesson is painful for Nora, it also relieves her of the regret she had around Volts, regret that was grounded in assumptions Nora made about Volts’ health and her own ability to care for other creatures. Nora couldn’t have known that Volts had a heart condition, which emphasizes that no matter how hard one tries, there are fundamental mysteries and unknowns in life that may thwart, disrupt, or ignore one’s best efforts. Similarly, Nora regrets not going to Australia with Izzy because she thought it made her a bad friend. However, that move would have inadvertently caused Izzy’s death, something that Nora would have regretted for the rest of her life. This suggests that Nora’s regret is often based on a faulty or partial view of reality, one that blames bad outcomes on her choices instead of the inherent uncertainty and unpredictability of being alive.
This section also explores the motif of swimming, which represents both being in the flow of life and drowning in other people’s dreams. As soon as Nora slides into the Australian life, she finds herself in a swimming pool. As she moves her body through the water, she remembers that what she loves most about swimming is losing herself to the simple action of it and entering into a flow state. This is evocative of what Nora strives for in each life she visits: to put aside her worry, self-consciousness, and self-criticism, and fully experience life for what it is. Nora is most happy when she can be present for what a moment holds. At the same time, Nora remembers why she gave up swimming, as the pure joy of the activity became freighted with her father’s pressure. This suggests that what often prevents Nora from living in the flow of a life she loves is the weight of other people’s expectations.
