Good Morning Sasha

Essay by noone December 2004

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In Good Morning Midnight Jean Rhys explores a claustrophobic kind of exile in Sasha Jenson who has been sent back to Paris. Aimless wanders through Paris, the site of the dissolution of her marriage and the death of her child, trying halfheartedly to reestablish a life.

Sasha's past, with it's memories of extreme poverty, love, and betrayal, threads it's way through her present (she studiously avoids then drunkenly confronts certain cafes, neighborhoods, bit characters from her previous life in Paris). One of the strongest impressions the reader takes from Sasha reflection, is a feeling of great solitude, a mind jolting around in its own skull. Sasha is both trivial and fatalistic; because she cares deeply about nothing, because she can become almost paralyzed with anxiety at social contact, she creates a localized power over her immediate surroundings and she has unstable control over her life.

My intention in writing this essay is to discuss Jean Rhys 'Good Morning Midnight' and see how George Lukacs would interpret this novel according to his theory about modernism.

George Lukacs would use Jean Rhys novel to support his argument against modernism and he would say " modernism leads not only to the destruction of traditional literary forms, It leads to the destruction of literature as such" because Sasha for Lukacs " is reduced to a sequence of unrelated experiential fragments: she is as inexplicable to others as to herself". This is true as long as Sasha character is isolated, disconnected, and belongs to nowhere.

Sasha character may cause harm to literature, because this character for Lukacs makes the novel aimless, meaningless, and have no didactic purpose. So reading this novel would be a source of entertainment rather than teach or guide the new generation to the right path.

The true art for Lukacs is...