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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BetaSymbols & Motifs
Pets
Pets are an important recurring motif, serving as lenses through which the characters view their relationships with people. As her relationship with Apollo evolves, the narrator remembers cats she has owned and the ways they died, and she worries more and more about the day when Apollo will also pass away. As the narrator sinks into a deep depression, caring for Apollo keeps her active; over time, the relationship becomes a way to resolve her feelings. Though she still misses the man and still worries about Apollo, she makes peace with her grief, accepts the death of her friend, and moves on with her life.
The woman writing the book creates the story of the narrator and Apollo, inspired by the man’s relationship with his dachshund. The woman contrasts the narrator’s relationship with Apollo against the narrator’s relationship with the deceased friend. As a writer, the woman exaggerates this symbolism, increasing the size of the dog as much as possible—much as she admits to exaggerating certain elements of the truth as she writes about the dog’s symbolic meaning.
The title of the novel can be interpreted as not only referring to the friend of the narrator (the man who killed himself) but also to the dog she acquires after his death. As such, pets, particularly Apollo, carry significant symbolic value in the context of the novel. Apollo becomes the friend that the narrator needs while grieving, and her story charts the relationship between the narrator and Apollo as a proxy for her relationship with her deceased friend.
Books
Many of the novel’s characters refer to books when communicating complicated emotions and ideas—ideas which, even though many of them are writers, they struggle to express in their own words. Books are tools for coping with difficult emotions, whether they’re being read or written. When the narrative draws back and reveals its metatextual nature—the audience has been reading a novel the woman is currently writing—it becomes clear that the work is not just a book about grief and grieving, but a book about one woman’s grieving process: The narrator’s use of books as metaphors feeds into the larger metaphor of the woman’s book having been written as a metaphor.
A complicated and emotional process, fraught with difficulties at every stage, the act of writing illuminates the characters’ inner struggles. Because so many of this novel’s characters are writers, the books they’re writing (or thinking of writing) are emotional parallels for certain episodes in their lives and what they thought and felt at the time. Characters who are writing books about difficult subjects, such as human trafficking, are forced to confront their own neuroses by struggling with the material. Other characters find themselves afflicted with writer’s block during difficult periods in their lives; some give up writing altogether and begin raising goats instead. Few characters who write books are happy with the process or the books that exist when they finish.
Suicide Notes
Those who commit suicide frequently leave notes to communicate with loved ones left behind. Throughout the book, the narrator mentions writers who killed themselves, commenting on whether or not they left suicide notes and discussing the symbolic meaning of each note as she would a piece of writing in one of her academic lectures or analyses. By examining the nature of the note in this context, the author highlights the often inexplicable nature of suicide and suffering, as well as the complex emotions and desperation felt by those who are left to grieve.
One writer who did not leave a note: her friend, who died with his actions unexplained, making a conscious choice that left her to struggle to make sense of what happened to him.
