History Fridge / TheNightCircus

* When A. H. comes to takes Marco away from the foster house, Marco goes with him, even though A.H. is cold, snappy and refuses to tell anything about himself. Yet Marco preferred the company of such person to being in a foster house.

*** [[spoiler: Widget told Mr. as much of the story as he could at the time. Years later, he adds more chapters, and has the book published, perhaps after Mr. A. H has finally died.]]

*** The thing is, they can't be. [[spoiler: Poppet is in London when Widget begins his story; and A. H- is the audience, hearing those words from Widget firsthand: "The circus arrives without warning". How could either of them, at that moment, be putting the words into Widget's mouth? And why would they?]] Thought perhaps the issue should be restated as this: [[spoiler: Widget ''is'' the narrator, but him being such creates a minor plothole.]]

* Hector Bowen tries to make himself immortal to stop his advancing age, but makes a mistake with the spell and ends up as a faded, ghostly version of himself. Throughout the book we get hints about Mr. A. H's nature - his footsteps make no noise, he does not have a shadow, he never, ever physically touches Marco in all the years of tutoring him. This is because Mr. A. H has successfully cast the same spell as Hector Bowen, and transformed himself into a ghost, but without the fading side-effects that Hector suffers from.

** Or [[spoiler:Poppet writes them.]]

** Unless [[spoiler:Mr. A. H- later added those parts in himself.]]

* Widget's conversation with Mr. A. H- near the end of the book reveals that [[spoiler: Widget is the narrator of the story, made clear when his story for Mr. A. H- begins with the first lines of the book.]] However, the first lines of The Night Circus occur in one of those second-person chapters in-between parts of the book, and those sections are established as taking place in the future [[spoiler: when the very last one of them includes Bailey's email address. Widget begins to recount the story to Mr. A. H- in 1903; e-mail did not exist yet, and since Widget sees the past and not the future, he'd have no idea that it would ever exist. As such, he can't be the narrator of the book.]]

* Widget is born just before midnight, and sees the past. Poppet is born just after midnight, and sees the future.

** There's the color scheme in general, for that matter: black and white, with splashes of red. Throughout the book, Prospero and A.H. try to sort the matter of which of their schools of magic is better in a black and white manner. But like the red that breaks up the division of colors, Celia and Marcus TakeAThirdOption and find that collaborating their magic makes even greater results, proving that it's impossible to simply rank one type of magic over the other..

* The physical book itself is almost completely black and white, even with black edges on the pages. Then there's the red ribbon place holder. Before reading the book it just looks like a pretty finishing touch but after reading about how the rêveurs dress it all makes perfect sense.

* [[spoiler: Although Bailey rips the twins names out of Marco's book, he doesn't remove anyone else. All of the other performers are stuck in the circus until they find some way to die like Tara. The Murphy twins' parents had to watch their kids grow old and die while they stayed the same age.]]