Abstract
What characterizes Good Morning, Midnight from the very first page, is the extent to which the narrative is shaped by the consciousness of its protagonist, Sasha, and the mood that permeates all of her thoughts and experiences. She appears consumed by a form of restless despair, an anguish that entails a continual examination of her own consciousness and identity. This master thesis attempts an existential reading of Jean Rhys s novel, while employing Søren Kierkegaard s concept of anxiety as a theoretical crux. Thus aligning an aesthetic work of art and a philosophical concept so that they intersect, allowing them both to enrich and clarify the other. In a sense attempting to anchor the complexity of the theoretical concept in the specificity that is Sasha s experience, while also utilizing anxiety to describe the non-verbal despair that characterizes her narrative. Despite the immediate distance between the two components of the thesis, allowing them to resonate with each other proves to refine our understanding of them both, and at the same time suggests that there is an existential vein running from Kierkegaard and the concept of anxiety, through the modern and modernism, to Rhys and Good Morning, Midnight. Through a series of different thematic approaches this thesis explores the constitution of Sasha s self and identity, with a special emphasis on the form and function of narrative fragmentation, internal distancing, dissonance, ambiguity, paradox and indirectness. Especially in terms of the novel s ending, the concept of anxiety allows us a new set of tools to understand and interpret the change she goes through, thus exploring Sasha as an anxious self.