58 pages • 1 hour read
Donna TarttThe Little Friend
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Color Blue
The color blue symbolizes the glorified past as it exists in Harriet’s mind (not as it existed in the actual past). Because of her family’s embellished stories and the few objects she has to bolster them, Harriet imagines the past as someplace better than the present or the future—a place that precedes pain and loss. Harriet also imagines that Robin perpetually inhabits this perfect past, memorialized as an innocent, happy, uncomplicated child. Photographs and memories of Robin are often bathed in blue light, and Harriet seeks this same sort of “blue” relief from existence whenever she holds her breath in the pool. Various decorative objects from Tribulation are blue, and these symbolize how the past has been revised and glorified to be “prettier” than it actually was. Of course, Harriet is not able to literally travel back in time and bathe herself in this same blue light that Robin enjoys. The closest she gets is when she “loses herself” while floating and holding her breath because this is the closest she comes to death. Rather than imagining death as ultimate pain or loss, Harriet views it as freedom or release from loss.
Tribulation
Tribulation, the Cleve ancestral home, also symbolizes the glorified past and helps to explicitly develop The Dangers of Revisionist History. Harriet was a baby when Tribulation was sold (and it burned down shortly thereafter), so she relies on photographs and family stories to understand what the house was like. Her family exaggerates the house’s grandeur and fails to mention that it was decaying, lacking a century’s worth of repairs that rendered parts of it unusable and/or dangerous. Moreover, they blame the loss of the house and its objects not on Judge Cleve’s poor financial decisions but on the “Yankees.” Harriet grows up believing that her family was once almost royal and that Northerners, Black people, and working-class white people are to blame for their loss of fortune and happiness. Harriet grows up unhappily, but in reality, this is not because of any of the aforementioned groups, nor is it because her family lost its fortune. Her pain is because they lost Robin, her father moved away, her mother never recovered, and Harriet is lonely. However, she’s distracted by the stories of Tribulation and misses the point of what’s wrong, causing her to make decisions that hurt more than they help.
Snakes
Snakes symbolize the duality of existence and how life brings both joy and pain, hope and loss. Eugene and Loyal use snakes in their preaching, arguing that snakes are not evil since God created them; snakes are simply part of the universe, and necessary for its overall functioning. Loyal also claims that snakes won’t bite or kill people if God doesn’t want them to. Ironically, there is some truth to this because when Harriet and Hely steal a poisonous snake and attempt to use it to murder Danny, they accidentally throw it in the car with Gum instead, and although it bites her, she doesn’t die. Although Harriet and Hely tried to harness the snakes for use in their own murder plot, the snakes refuse to be harnessed because as Pem remarks, snakes cannot truly be trained. This represents the mysterious will of God or the universe, which sometimes works in ways beyond human comprehension.
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By Donna Tartt
