95 pages • 3 hours read
Erin MorgensternThe Starless Sea
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
AfterwardChapter Summaries & Analyses
Afterward: “Something New and Something Next”
Afterward, Chapter 1 Summary: “Once, not so long ago…”
Dorian and the woman who was once a bunny but whose name is not Eleanor sail on the rising sea with Zachary’s corpse bleeding on her maps. He hears a commotion on deck as the owls try to land on the sails to stay afloat. Dorian asks how high the sea will rise, but Eleanor assures him that there are many caverns and she knows how to navigate them all. Eleanor asks, and Dorian confirms that the body is his “person.” She recognizes the coat he wears and asks what he is reading. Dorian shows her Sweet Sorrows. She is surprised to learn of its travels and smiles to have it returned, though it was never truly hers.
Eleanor tells Dorian that there is a man sitting on a precipice reading. She plans to pick him up when the sea level reaches it. Though she does not realize it, her words show that the person is Simon, the one she had initially been searching for: “I don’t know how he’d get out otherwise, he only has one hand” (486).
Dorian hears Fate’s heart beating and asks himself what the difference is between Fate’s heart and a heart that belongs to Fate, kept in her care until required. Dorian looks back and forth between Zachary and the box, considering what he believes. As he opens the box, the heart beats faster: Its moment has finally arrived.
Afterward, Chapter 2 Summary: “excerpt from the Secret Diary of Katrina Hawkins”
Kat found a note on her car that said “come and see” (488), with an address for a nearby vacant building. After some time, she decided to go in and discovered that it used to be a library. She saw paintings everywhere, with an unusual style: “like graffiti and Renaissance oil paintings had mural babies” (489). One of the paintings was of Zachary and Dorian, whom Kat recognized from the bar. Another of them was Kat in the clothes she was currently wearing with the notebook that was currently in her hand. On a particularly large wall, she a massive owl with a crown above its head. Under the Owl King, she saw a door with a crown, a heart, and a feather arranged in a vertical line down the center. Kat knew that the other side of the door was only a wall, but she had a key. She took her Moon tarot card and left her notebook in the car in case she did not come back.
Kat wrote to a future reader, saying that she was here and that these things happened, that it “might sound weird, but sometimes life is like that. Sometimes life gets weird. You can try to ignore it or you can see here it takes you. You open a door. What happens next? I’m going to find out (491).
Afterward, Chapter 3 Summary: “…Fate fell in love with Time”
Zachary Ezra Rawlins wakes up with a new heart beating hard in his chest. He is alive and on a ship. He falls while trying to stand, but Dorian catches him. They stare at each other, then they laugh and finally kiss without the complications of distance, time, or fate.
Afterward, Chapter 4 Summary: “Not the single story she requested but many stories”
Outside the former library, the Keeper flips through Kat’s notebook and Rhyme looks through a window. Neither of them notices the approaching woman wearing a crown, but the stars do. She watches the Keeper read, then looks up at the stars. She holds a card out toward the moon. On the first side, the card shows a void—the ending—but on the other side, a bright expansion—the beginning. She turns it one more time, and the card dissolves into golden dust. She bows, straightens her crown, and walks to the car. She asks if the Keeper has been waiting long as he puts his jacket over her shivering shoulders. “Not long,” he answers, though he has waited a long time for this moment.
Mirabel asks if Kat has opened the door yet. The Keeper says that she has not yet, but that she will since she has already shown her decision by leaving her notebook. He asks after Zachary. Mirabel says he is doing better: “He didn’t think I’d let him have a happy ending. I’m kind of offended” (494). The Keeper suggests that he may not have thought he deserved one. Mirabel asks if that is what the Keeper thought. She reminds him that he does not have to be there now. He answers that neither does she, yet they are both there. She smiles; he tucks her hair behind her ear and pulls her in for a kiss. The new story begins: “Inside the brick building a door opens into a new Harbor upon the Starless Sea. Far above the stars are watching, delighted” (494).
Afterward Analysis
Mirabel and Kat’s professed opinions on story endings both prove valid. The end does give meaning to the story, but the ending is also a “goodbye” where the reader can believe it continues in “story space.” In that vein, the Afterward shows the story continuing in story space as the beginning of a new story. After Dorian places Fate’s heart in Zachary’s chest—foreshadowed in Allegra’s painting of Zachary and Dorian, which depicted Zachary with a golden heart—Zachary and Dorian finally have their kiss and, according to the narration, their story is only beginning, as “no story ever truly ends as long as it is told” (492).
In this new story, each pair of separated lovers has been or is about to be reunited. Eleanor and Simon soon will be reunited on her ship. The inn at the crossroads, untethered in time, will also continue, allowing the moon and her husband their reunions. Even Time (the Keeper of the universe clock) and Fate (Mirabel) are reunited, beginning a new story. They choose to return to the Starless Sea, though they are no longer bound to it.
While Zachary’s story has officially ended, a new one has begun—a concept epitomized by Mirabel’s card, with ending on one side and beginning on the other. The card dissolves into the same golden dust as the egg, which symbolizes the story. The sky-blue car seen by Zachary in Simon’s representation of the story is Kat’s car sitting outside the library (also seen in Simon’s representation); the library is where the new story will begin when Kat enters through a door into a new Harbor.
The story that Zachary told the ice-Mirabel echoes the new beginning, complete with a journey on a ship and a door to a new Harbor on the Starless Sea, this time marked with a crown, a heart, and a feather. As ending fades into beginning, the stars—which may include the reader—continue watching the latest story, “delighted.” Zachary made his choices, but in the end, he received the happy ending foreordained by Fate.
