The Midnight Library

One of the biggest issues with Nora’s root life is that Nora felt like she wasn’t doing anything noteworthy. Nora thought existence meant experiencing amazing highs instead of lows and that a good life would certainly be somewhere other than Bedford. Nora attempts suicide because she loses so much in the span of such a short time, and because this loss makes her feel like there is nothing meaningful about her existence.

Once Nora enters the Midnight Library, she slowly realizes that the point of life is life itself. Through a combination of Mrs. Elm’s lectures, life experiences, and applied philosophy, Nora learns that her previous view of life as a series of highs doesn’t align with her later experiences of life. In Svalbard, for instance, while experiencing a vastly different life, Nora considers the following:

Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself. Maybe it wasn’t the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother’s parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place (138-39).