The Night Circus

    When I first started reading this book, I was a little unsure of it. It had kind of a slow start and I didn’t really like any of the characters. But boy, oh boy, once it got going it was very hard to put the book down. As soon as I got to 1/3 of the way into book I ended up finishing the rest in one sitting. I enjoyed it thoroughly and I almost want to read it again.

    I felt like it presented a lot of complex themes and moral issues. The author means the circus itself to represent stories and art. She teaches readers the importance of telling stories and suggests what qualities make a great one. This includes blurring dueling ideas and stressing the importance of dreams and magic as inspirations for creating stories. She also pays tribute to The Tempest and inserts characters that function to her story much like Prospero did in Shakespeare's, but also sets her story apart from The Tempest.

   She frequently uses the characters to show a balancing and blurring of opposing thematic ideas. The need for balance in The Night Circus is represented with some of the following dualities: innate talent vs learned talent, past vs. future, choices vs. destiny, and dreams vs. reality.

   The innate talent and learned talent are represented by Celia and Marco, respectively; given how they each learn how to do magic and the opposing views of their teachers. At the end of the book when they join symbolically and physically with the circus, we see that the need for balance between these two ideals was necessary for the continued existence of the circus. The idea of past and future are represented in the characters Poppet and Widget; and also in the way the book is written, jumping between past and future. It finally concludes in the present, suggesting both elements of past and future are needed to understand the present and to tell a great story.

   Choices vs. Destiny also shows up a lot throughout the story. It seems like destiny when Marco and Celia fall in love, but at the same time they also choose love over destroying one another over a contest. Bailey seems destined to save the circus, but ultimately he chooses to join the circus because that is his dream. The author is saying that yes, destiny was inevitable, but it was the choices made by the characters that ultimately led to those destinies.

   The use of the color combination of black and white also symbolizes the balance of light vs dark. The red accent color that appears gradually as the book progresses symbolizes love and passion between the two main characters. Initially, it simply appears as an accent, since the story at first it doesn’t seem to be a love story. Then, as the characters grow closer and even admit to loving each other, the color red appears more and more.

   Another duality/balancing act is presented at the end of the novel, and that is the idea of Good vs. Evil. Here, Alexander tells Widget that good vs. evil is all a matter of perspective, and that most things in the real world are a blur, or a balance between two contrasting ideas. Nothing is ever actually just black and white in life. I find it clever that this idea is presented by the man who always wears Grey. Overall, I really enjoyed this book and the complexity it presents on various levels definitively made the read very captivating interesting.