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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BetaParts 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 7 Summary
The narrator meets Wife One, who lives abroad. While studying together, they had described themselves as a “literary Manson family” (75), who held their teacher in the highest possible esteem. The narrator tells Wife One about the “loss of conviction in the purpose of fiction” (76) the deceased man found in later life. The internet allowed him to view the opinions of many readers, many of whom misread or misinterpreted his work. He became “dismayed by the ubiquity of careless reading” (78). Wife One says “oh dear.”
Wife One and the narrator discuss Apollo. Wife One cannot believe that “they dumped a monster like that on you” (79), but the narrator cannot bear the thought that the large dog is unwanted. The narrator has the feeling that “if I don’t keep him something bad will happen” (81). She acknowledges the connection between her feelings for the deceased friend and her new dog, wondering whether she will “wake up one morning to find [Apollo] gone and [her friend] in his place” (81).
Hector feels bad that he reported the narrator to the landlord. A second warning has come and gone. The narrator tries not to leave the dog alone and feels anxious when she does. Apollo still sleeps on the bed; his presence is an “amazing comfort” when the narrator is afflicted by dark thoughts in the middle of the night.
Winter arrives. The narrator stays in the city for the holidays, taking long walks with the dog. She receives the final warning from her landlord. Her friends intervene, trying to prevent the narrator from losing her home. They think she needs bereavement therapy and propose multiple solutions. Only one person offers to take the dog—Wife Two—but the narrator does not trust her and refuses the offer. The narrator is told by Wife One that she cannot just wait for a miracle, “but that is what [the narrator is] waiting for” (84).
Part 8 Summary
The narrator reads a piece of writing aloud and Apollo listens. When she stops, he seems to implore her to continue. She begins to read from a book by Rainer Marie Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet) and the dog’s mood seems to improve. The narrator loves the book, but her students do not; “they say it’s ridiculous” (86). She reflects on a time when she and her friend believed that “writing was the best thing we could ever hope to do with our lives” (87). She thinks about the life of Rilke; an adorer of women who wished to adore as many women as possible, he left his wife, and she eventually killed herself at age 71. Apollo falls asleep listening to these words.
The next day, Apollo picks up a book in his mouth and places it beside the narrator. The narrator decides that “someone must have read aloud to [Apollo]” (89). She reflects on Flannery O’Connor’s own correspondence with a young writer, in which she offered the young woman advice. Matters turn to religion and the correspondent falls in and out of faith. The woman who wrote to O’Connor published nothing; later, she killed herself. When the narrator attends faculty meetings and holds her office hours, she thinks about former students whose lives have interrupted their writing, often for the better. She thinks about successful writers, like James Patterson, and the writing tips he offers.
On the anniversary of her friend’s death, the narrator considers showing Apollo a video of his former owner but worries that it “might be cruel” (93). Watching Apollo sleep, the narrator feels a “surge of contentment” (94) and decides that “nothing is going to separate us” (94).
Part 9 Summary
In college, the narrator had a part-time job typing up the transcripts of a couples therapist. The men typically cheated, the women typically nagged, and most of the couples eventually divorced. Often, “for husband and wife, the same word did not always have the same meaning” (96). Sometimes, the therapist’s role, she was told, was “to help two people let go” (96). Visiting her own therapist, the narrator is encouraged to bring her dog in with her. She smiles, thinking they are “in couples therapy” (97) themselves.
The narrator gets Apollo accredited as a service animal, although Wife One warns her that she is “committing fraud,” and she sends a copy of the certificate to the building management agent. The narrator reflects on suicide once again, reading books and listening to radio shows on the subject. She confesses to Apollo, in front of her therapist, that she is “beginning to feel a little better” (99).
The narrator admits that she misses her friend very much. Between childhood memories and more reflections on Wittgenstein, she describes the way that she dreams about him. Occasionally, she sees someone who looks like her friend and nearly calls out. Other times, she flies into sudden rages. One time, she tries to tell her therapist about a rendezvous with her friend in Berlin but breaks down crying each time she begins.
The internet, the narrator says, is “a godsend” (104) for anyone who does not want to be alone. She thinks about various group suicides around the world, particularly the Aokigahara Forest in Japan. The therapist thinks the narrator was in love with her friend, which “complicates the bereavement process” (105). The building management agent drops the case against keeping Apollo in the apartment. The narrator and Hector drink champagne.
Parts 7-9 Analysis
Throughout these parts, the writer continues discussing writing and literature as a way of analyzing her friend, and her relationship with him. She mentions two authors touched by suicide: Rilke, whose wife committed suicide, and O’Connor, who lost a close pen pal, an aspiring writer, to suicide. Both writers mentored other aspiring writers—as does James Patterson, whom she also mentions—much as the narrator mentors writers as a teacher, and as her dead friend mentored her. This discussion highlights the enormous power a mentor has over a mentee, and it explains the complexity that ensued in her own life when her mentor took their relationship in a sexual direction. Even though they only shared one encounter, the closeness achieved through sharing deeply personal work, and the thrall that her friend held over her as an advisor, interacted with that physical closeness to create a complex emotional stew.
The narrator also begins to spend more and more time in therapy, bringing Apollo with her. Although therapy begins as a scheme to have Apollo labeled a service animal (and thus make it permissible to keep him in her apartment), the therapy facilitates certain breakthroughs for the narrator and brings the narrator’s character into focus for the reader. The narrator describes each session as “couples therapy,” further cementing two truths: that many of her thoughts about Apollo are also thoughts about her dead friend, and that her relationship with her dead friend was more complicated that she is willing to admit. When she breaks down into tears during a session and is unable to tell the story of her rendezvous with her friend in Berlin, the therapist sees clearly what the narrator does not: She was in love with him.
Conversations in therapy enable the narrator to explore new and hitherto unmentioned areas of the relationship she shared with her dead friend. The therapist offers alternate truths that haven’t been communicated in the narrator’s own writing, which shares only the truth from the narrator’s perspective. In the end, it is implied that the narrator’s wish for Apollo to be a service animal may not be fraudulent after all; she may very well be in need of the animal’s support. Also, like the couples therapist for whom she wrote transcriptions in college, her current therapist is there to help her let go.
Parts 7 through 9 also explore the differing relationships the narrator has with the former wives of her dead friend. These women, like the narrator, are not given names. Rather, they are defined by their chronological relationship to the man she knew: they are Wife One, Wife Two, and Wife Three. The narrator feels differently about each: She was a student alongside Wife One, and the two were good friends; she does not like or trust Wife Two; and she feels ambivalent toward Wife Three, though Wife Three is responsible for bringing Apollo into the narrator’s life.
The different dynamics come into focus as the text progresses. Wife One, for example, forms a regular dialogue with the narrator. They talk, so much so that they are willing to discuss the finer details of the narrator’s life, such as her quest to have Apollo accredited as a service dog. Wife One feels close enough to the narrator to warn her against doing so.
Wife Two appears only once: After an intervention in which friends try to help the narrator, Wife Two offers to take ownership of the dog, an offer the narrator refuses because she does not trust Wife Two, and to give the dog to Wife Two would be akin to losing her friend to Wife Two many years before. Wife Three is somewhere between the two extremes, appearing occasionally to hear complaints and offer advice, though it is never particularly well received. There is a latent respect between the narrator and Wife Three, if not a warm relationship.
