37 pages • 1 hour read
Sigrid NunezThe Friend
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A 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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The Narrator
The first-person narrator of the novel is never named. Most of the prose seemingly addresses a deceased friend who has recently committed suicide. At the end of the novel, it becomes clear that that the narrator is not actually a person, but the main character in a woman’s book. The woman, whose friend recently tried and failed to commit suicide, has chosen to write a book in which she imagines what would have happened if the man had succeeded. The unnamed narrator becomes an emotional proxy for the imagined grief that the woman is feeling.
The emotions the narrator feels are no less poignant because she is a creation within a creation; the relationship which she builds with Apollo the dog is no less authentic. Indeed, the relationship with Apollo comes to define the narrator. At first, she is an unwilling owner. Her apartment block does not permit tenants to own dogs and she cannot imagine finding time in her life to car for such a large and demanding creature—she confesses that she prefers cats—but she feels an obligation to her deceased friend, to whom she never said goodbye.
The bond which the narrator forms with Apollo becomes close to the point of being destructive. She relies on the dog, as Apollo seems to be the only one who can reflect back the grief she feels. He becomes an emotional parallel, an equivalent mourner who seems to understand how devastating it is to be without the dead man. As a result, the narrator cannot bear to let the dog go. Even when she reaches her final warning and is under threat of being thrown out of her rent-controlled apartment, even when her friends stage an intervention, she cannot bear to be without Apollo.
As a Great Dane, Apollo does not have a long life span: He is already old and suffering from stiffness in his joints. Soon enough, he will die, and the narrator will be all alone again. She begs and pleads with unseen forces, desperate for more time with the dog she has come to love. As the dog ages and as her grief over the loss of her friend transforms into something healthier, she accepts the truth of the matter. In the final chapter, she takes the rapidly declining dog to the shore and spends one final summer with him. This is the final stage of her grief: acceptance over the loss of her friend. Though the narrator is the creation of another character, she embodies not only the grief portrayed in the novel but the imagined grief of the woman writing the story.
The Deceased Friend
The deceased friend of the narrator, also unnamed, functions as a proxy for the author’s real-life friend. The deceased friend character is a British writer and flaneur, a womanizer who has been married three times to three different women. He has spent most of his life as a writer held in high regard, even if he never did win the Nobel Prize that his most devoted followers expected him to win. Some time before committing suicide, the man found a Great Dane and named him Apollo. After an unsuccessful campaign to find the dog’s owner, he decided to keep the animal, which was then passed along to the narrator upon his death.
The deceased friend suffers—more than most of the characters in the text —from severe mental health problems. He has bouts of depression which he hides from many characters, though his struggles were known to those closest to him. After one such bout, he commits suicide. He does not leave a note, which perplexes many people (especially as he was a writer), and the narrator dedicates a large amount of time to trying to understand why he killed himself.
One reason for the deceased friend’s depression was the changing of the times. As something of a womanizer—he was, for example, a fierce defender of professors’ rights to sleep with their students—he found the current world around him too unfamiliar, too limiting. Female students of his complained about his referring to them by patronizing and patriarchal nicknames. He lamented that students and professors were no longer allowed to behave as they pleased. He gave up teaching as a result, though the narrator notes that he will likely not be missed.
The woman writing the novel-within-a-novel exaggerates and obfuscates certain aspects of the deceased friend’s character while retaining a core kernel of truth about her real-life friend. The real-life man worries about his characterization as the deceased friend, a potentially unflattering portrayal. This concern proves ironic: Throughout the book, the deceased friend is quoted emphasizing the importance of bravery and honesty in writing; he believes that nothing should be off limits in the world of fiction or in the classroom. The fear of the real man and the supposed wisdom of the deceased friend stand at odds with one another, suggesting that the novelist may believe her friend to be a hypocrite. As a man out of time, a man whose best years are behind him, and a man whom women no longer look at with lust, the deceased friend struggled to deal with middle age. After almost an entire novel in which he has existed almost entirely through memories and witticisms, this revelation makes the deceased friend seem far more human.
The Woman
Though she only appears for one chapter, the woman described in Part 11 is perhaps the most important character in the book. The entire novel—including the narrator, Apollo, and many of the events described—are written by her. They are based on facts from the woman’s life, exaggerated, embellished, obfuscated, and altered to create a more engaging novel. Everything the audience has read thus far has been her creation; she is the person from whom all other characters stem, and she is the originator of every emotion within the novel, the framing device that contextualizes and explains everything that occurs.
After her friend tries and fails to kill himself, the woman imagines what her life might have been like if he had succeeded. She turns the man’s dachshund into a large, slobbering Great Dane; she makes her friend British, rather than Jewish like his real-life counterpart; she writes the novel in a first-person, confessional style, dictating the narrator’s thoughts and emotions as she sees fit. This imagined reality comes alive in the story of the narrator and Apollo. Writing the novel is the woman’s way of processing the guilt and sadness surrounding her friend’s unsuccessful suicide attempt; the act allows her to communicate thoughts and feelings that may have otherwise remained unsaid.
Apollo
Apollo is a Great Dane, a huge though aging dog who is discovered one day by a middle-aged writer (the deceased friend) and taken home. Although the man attempts to search for the dog’s real owner, he cannot reunite the dog with the correct person. Much to his wife’s disdain, the man decides to keep the dog and names him Apollo. At the time, the man is experiencing severe mental health issues, though this is not known to many people. When Apollo comes into his life, he finds a companion, a being whom he can trust and love without complications or limits. It is a bilateral relationship: Apollo also loves his owner, so when the deceased friend kills himself, the dog is just as devastated as the deceased man’s human friends.
During this period of mourning, Apollo comes to live with the narrator. She does not want a dog—she prefers cats—but she misses her friend and regrets not being there in his final moments to save him from himself. Apollo becomes a symbol for the departed writer, his emotional legacy, the means through which she can hope to atone for her self-described sins. Although she cannot save her friend, she might be able to save his dog.
