57 pages • 1 hour read
Stephenie MeyerMidnight Sun
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 25-27Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary: “Race”
Edward, Emmett, and Carlisle head to Phoenix by plane, planning to meet Bella at the airport. At the airport, Edward senses that Alice’s mind is in disarray. Edward realizes Bella slipped away, and Alice explains that she could not go after Bella—she had to wait for the other three for Bella’s only chance of surviving her upcoming encounter with James. They leave the airport and begin searching for a fast enough car to steal. Edward and Alice team up, using their powers together to take the absolute fastest route to saving Bella without getting held up by the police, who would be looking for the stolen car. Alice’s visions of the road ahead begin to be interrupted by visions of Bella. These distract Edward, who thinks about Alice, “her panic bled through her thoughts” (565). He looks for a different car to switch to, mid-highway, and he forces one off the road. They switch into the other car and speed off again. The whole time Edward sees Bella’s near future through Alice’s mind. Jasper helps Edward cope by using his abilities to numb Edward’s emotional pain as they drive towards Bella. When they near the dance studio where James has Bella, they all sneak in.
Chapter 26 Summary: “Blood”
Inside, Emmett and Jasper take care of James. Edward goes to Bella, who is crumpled on the floor and covered in blood. Bella is in bad shape, but Carlisle is confident that he can save her. The other Cullens struggle to control themselves with Bella’s blood everywhere, but they manage to hold themselves together. Bella starts shrieking that her hand is burning and they realize that James bit her. Alice tries to tell Edward to change Bella faster, to reduce the duration of pain, but he refuses. This makes Edward distraught, but Carlisle suggests that Edward try sucking the venom out of Bella. Edward thinks it will be too difficult for him, but he forces himself to try. Alice helps by showing Edward futures of Bella alive and human. Once he has sucked the venom out, Edward struggles to stop drinking Bella’s blood. Edward can tell that even Alice struggles to know how to help, and he thinks, “Alice could see I was lost. I could hear her wondering frantically if she could pull me off Bella, or if that fight would just injure Bella more” (582). Bella’s voice brings Edward back to himself and he stops. Before Bella passes out from the morphine Carlisle gave her, she tells Alice that James’s video will reveal things about Alice’s past. The Cullens then take Bella to the hospital.
Chapter 27 Summary: “Chores”
The Cullens drive Bella towards a hospital while Alice makes plans for to cover their tracks. She plans how they will get into the hospital without suspicion. She also decides how she will create the scene of an accident at a hotel to give Bella a plausible explanation for her injuries. Alice plans to get rid of the stolen car, replacing it with a rental. She also decides how they will get Bella’s truck to Phoenix, to play along with Bella’s story that she drove to Phoenix from Forks.
Chapters 25-27 Analysis
Chapter 25, like Chapter 24, serves mostly as dramatic tension delaying the fight between James and the Cullens. As the Cullens speed from the airport in Phoenix to save Bella, Meyer shows illustrates the strong connection between Edward and Alice as the two of them meld their supernatural abilities together, working like a well-oiled machine. Jasper helps to merge them with his abilities too, and Edward thinks, “we were all sharing his battle focus now, something he’d used to keep his newborns on track back in his war years” (566). Likewise, in Chapter 27, when the Cullens drive Bella to the hospital, Meyer mostly smooths out the details she introduced with Midnight Sun to a plot already known from Twilight. She does so by explaining the mundane details of how the Cullens obscure the supernatural details of Bella’s injuries from any humans.
Chapter 26, when the Cullens save Bella from James and dispose of him, is the core of this section. Edward's character evolves further as he demonstrates his own selflessness and his turn away from his own ego as he chooses to forego any confrontation with James. When Edward arrives at the dance studio, he decides to prioritize Bella over his own desire to take revenge on James. He even thinks, “I knew that at some point in the near future, I would be jealous of Emmett and Jasper. I would wish for the chance to claw and slash and sever. But that was all meaningless now” (573). In doing so, Edward is fighting against his vampiric impulses to protect Bella. He must also do the same after he and Carlisle realize that James bit Bella, which would, without intervention, turn her into a vampire. This is contrary to everything that Edward wants for Bella, and his struggle to clear Bella’s blood of venom without killing her represents the novel’s final climax. As he sucks the venom out of Bella, Edward must fight against the temptation that her blood in particular holds for him to keep her alive. To do so, he relies again on Alice’s visions. He thinks, “Alice showed me a thousand glimpses of the future. Bella smiling, Bella laughing, Bella reaching or my hand” (581). In these futures, Edward is capable of saving Bella. Despite any shortcomings in Alice’s powers, even those that led to James capturing Bella, Edward relies on his sister wholly to convince him that he can maintain his relationship with Bella and her humanity. Ultimately, Edward denies his vampiric nature to keep Bella alive and human.
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