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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
The Power of Despair to Distort Reality
Throughout the novel, Nora is often steeped in despair, which impedes her ability to accurately perceive reality. Before she visits the Midnight Library, Nora’s judgment grows increasingly clouded by her grief and pain as she experiences a series of difficult life events. This period of darkness is initiated by the death of her beloved cat Volts, which complicates her already painful grieving process after recently losing her mother. Nora also blames herself for Volts’ death and believes the self-prescribed narrative that she is worthless and brings nothing good to the world. As a result, the events in her life feed into the same narrative of herself, so that when she loses her job, thinks about letting down her fiancé and her best friend, and loses her piano client, each event proves for her what she already believes: that she has nothing good to offer the world.
Through her journey in the Midnight Library in the wake of her suicide attempt, Nora learns that each of these beliefs about her own unworthiness are based on false, ungenerous, or distorted beliefs. She learns that her cat actually had his happiest possible life with her and died through no fault of hers. She learns that, had she stayed with her fiancé, they would have been miserable together, and if she’d gone to Australia with Izzy, her best friend would have died. She also learns that her piano student’s and her neighbor’s lives are both significantly improved by her small actions. Taken together, all of this illustrates that Nora’s perspective was darkened by her grief and despair, and that the aspersions she cast against herself, that lead to her attempt on her life, were all based on distortions that didn’t reflect reality.
The Unpredictable Nature of Choice
Throughout the novel, Nora is confronted with the unpredictable nature of choice. Before her experience in the Midnight Library, Nora has a murky understanding of the consequences of her choices, but she feels certain that the choices she has made are the wrong ones. She focuses especially on the pain that she’s caused the people she loves, such as her fiancé, her brother, and her father, assuming that the choices that she made were harmful because the people in her life disagreed with them. Underpinning all her regrets was a belief that she knew what choices were right and wrong and that she had made a series of categorically wrong choices in her life.
However, given the gift of seeing what would happen if she made different choices, Nora learns that nothing is quite as she anticipated. For example, Dan believes that he’ll have a good life if he and Nora start a pub together in the countryside. But when Nora visits this life, she sees that they are both unhappier than they had been before, and that the pub life just brought a new set of problems. In leaving Dan, Nora had a certain wisdom that she couldn’t identify as she was too clouded with regret for hurting him. When she visits the pub life, she sees the negative aspects of their relationship, and it surprises her to learn that she’d made the right decision in leaving him. Nora learns, again and again, that each choice can have a surprising outcome and that her assumptions about what her future might have been are often faulty. These revelations point to the underlying mystery of life and the futility of trying to control the future.
The Illusory Nature of Success
Nora’s belief that she is a failure and that success is out of her reach is a large part of what drives her despair in her root life. Before taking her life, she berates herself for the choices she’s made, and she spirals into a dark mindset that tells her that she has wasted all the potential she had to make something of her life. This point of view is rooted in a fixed definition of success that draws on inherited ideas of what a good life is. For example, Nora believes that she is a failure for not sticking with swimming, and the underlying belief there is that pursuing the path of an Olympic athlete is automatically the better, more fruitful, and happy life to lead. This belief is rooted in Nora’s father’s ideas of success and ignores the fact that Nora was unhappy in the limelight, and that the pressure to succeed ruined her enjoyment of the sport she loved.
As she visits her alternative lives, Nora begins to unpack these traditional ideas of success, learning that the “successful” life doesn’t always equate to a happy or fulfilling life. When she enters the life of Nora the Olympian, Nora sees that, though she has an immense amount of personal power, physical strength, and a lifetime of accolades to her name, this Nora is just as lonely, depressed, and mentally unstable as Nora is in her root life. Though her father and her brother are still in her life, she feels emotionally disconnected from both of them. She slips out of that life, unsatisfied and disappointed, understanding that her root-life ideas about who she should be are based on flimsy assumptions. This lesson is strengthened when she visits her life as a rock star and finds that she is embroiled in drama, heartache, and pain. No amount of praise from strangers can make up for the fact that this path to success cost her her brother’s life. Thus, Nora learns to look elsewhere for fulfillment, trading the quest for success for the journey to deeper meaning.
