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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Physical Manifestations of Pain and Grief
One of the most important themes throughout the novel is grief and the way it manifests itself physically in the bodies of those who are suffering. Numerous characters or people discussed in the novel suffer psychosomatic symptoms and engage in ongoing efforts to combat the manifestations using therapy and other treatments.
The story opens with a discussion of Cambodian women in California who suffered so much violence under the Khmer Rouge that they cried themselves blind. Elsewhere in the text, other characters develop physical pains and lose their senses when they suffer emotional pain or loss. The narrator, after the suicide of her friend, begins to experience pain for which she knows there is no physical cause. The severity of her grief is enough to overcome her self-awareness and her cynicism: Grief and its associated physical symptoms become all consuming.
Even Apollo appears to suffer from physical manifestations of grief. After losing his beloved owner, the dog sinks into a depression. He lingers and slinks around the house, devoid of energy. At times, he sulks; at other times, his manner changes completely, and he howls and suffers from fits. Although she is unsure whether dogs can comprehend death and whether Apollo understands what has happened to his master, the narrator feels certain that he is in mourning. His sadness endears him to her; they suffer and grieve together, and taking care of the aging dog’s physical needs distracts the narrator from her own pain.
By the end of the novel, the narrator has moved temporarily to the seashore, a balm for the continuing physical problems from which Apollo suffers. In resolving physical pain, she also finds psychological resolution: She still misses her friend, but the physical pains of grief no longer afflict her.
The Value of Writing and Literature
As expected for a book within a book, interaction with literature is a pervasive and important theme. The protagonists, whether the narrator or the woman, are both well-read and are themselves writers. It seems natural that they should approach so difficult a topic as the death of a friend through the lens of literature. References, quotes, and citations of authors and their works vary considerably, spanning the length and breadth of the western canon. Literature becomes the means by which both the narrator and the woman try to come to terms with the idea of devastating loss: one by thinking about it, the other by writing about it.
For the narrator, who is both a writer and a teacher of writing, literary works and their creators provide a familiar, dependable framework of understanding. Her life has been defined by reading, teaching, and adding to these works, so it seems appropriate that she would turn to them at a difficult time. The novels and their authors are fixed and structured; they neither move nor escape, and they can be depended upon in a trying moment. While the grief the narrator suffers is sudden and seemingly impossible to wholly understand, literature provides a ready-made way in which to think about death, suicide, and grief.
Literature is not just for passive consumption; it’s a living canon, to be discussed and added to over time. As seen in Part 11, the novel itself is actually being written by the woman because she wants to explore what she experienced following a friend’s suicide attempt. She packs her novel full of familiar literature; by quoting from these works, she draws on pre-existing scripts for expressing grief and bewilderment until she can write a script of her own. Through an imagined alternate history of what may have happened had he succeeded, she writes her imagined healing process into existence and, in doing so, helps to exorcise her own troubling feelings.
Friendship
The novel explores three important friendships: the friendship between the narrator and her deceased friend, told entirely through flashback; the friendship between the narrator and Apollo, told in the present as the narrator learns to love the dog; and the friendship between the woman and the man, a single chapter that defines the book.
The narrator and the deceased man are close friends. Although he is a relentless womanizer, they have remained platonic associates (aside from one liaison). Their friendship worried at least one of the man’s wives, though the narrator remains on good terms with Wife One. Their dynamic is not atypical: The narrator was a student in the man’s class before they became friends. She idolized him and thought he might even win a Nobel Prize. She trusts his opinion and is able to recall conversations and advice he gave to her, ranking them alongside similar snippets from more famous authors. The friendship is mostly portrayed from her perspective, a point of view beset by grief and thus unreliable; his real opinion of their friendship is never explored. Through the insights of her therapist, and through her own confusion about sexual tensions and boundaries between mentors and mentees in her academic life, the novel suggests that despite her expression of it as platonic, she was deeply in love with her friend.
A more honest appraisal of the narrator’s friendship with the deceased man is found in her relationship with Apollo. When the narrator first adopts Apollo, she is annoyed that she cannot understand the dog’s thoughts and feelings. Although Apollo comforts her after the death of her friend, she must learn to interpret his wordless behavior, a silence that stands in sharp contrast to her human friend’s erudite nature. Apollo is not indifferent to her in the way cats have been; she feels hesitant to dominate him, a reflection of her hesitation to express her own needs and to ask for love from her dead friend. With her human friend, there was always an air of academia, a distant discourse that buried raw emotion in an endless stream of words. To understand Apollo, she has to access a higher level of emotional intelligence, and the experience leads to a fierce, essential friendship.
The penultimate chapter, which reveals the true purpose of the book, juxtaposes the friendship between the narrator and her dead friend, and the friendship between the woman and the man. When the woman tells the man that she has been writing a book about his failed suicide attempt, he reacts badly; although he, like the deceased character, should have plenty of insightful and interesting ways to express himself, he struggles to put together a coherent criticism of his friend, instead calling her sleazy and saying that he feels betrayed. In writing the book, the woman has deconstructed, with literary precision, what they mean to one another; because the man is not ready to accept or understand this, he is left to raw emotion, bereft of words.
