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.
Themes
Maturation as Loss
Several types of loss occur in The Little Friend: people die, but they also move away, get fired, drift apart from each other, and forget. In addition to human lives, other things such as houses, cars, keepsake objects, friendships, innocence, freedom, joy, and potential are also lost. Harriet becomes intimately familiar with all sorts of loss over the course of the novel, and this concept goes hand in hand with her own coming-of-age or maturation process. Characters of all ages experience loss, but the longer a life goes on, the more frequent and severe the losses become. Harriet already experienced the death of a close family member as a baby, and this loss is compounded when she starts losing more people, such as Libby and Ida. Even worse than this is the loss of hope and possibility that comes with maturation: Every choice Harriet makes seems to close the door on several other possibilities. Whereas her childlike faith in the “impossible” used to give Harriet purpose, by the end of the novel, this force dwindles as her maturity sets in. For example, she realizes it really is a mystery who killed Robin, and she is no longer able to hold up this impossible dream of discovering his murderer. Instead, she has to settle for the comfort that she attempted and failed at something impossible.
The loss that Harriet feels at maturation is also related to her gender. For example, her father gives her “What Shall I Be? […] a particularly flimsy game, meant to offer career guidance but no matter how well you played, it offered only four possible futures: teacher, ballerina, mother, or nurse” (85). Harriet resents having limited possibilities laid out for her and wishes to be able to make her own choices. She senses that as a girl child, she is afforded a relative degree of freedom that is going to be wrenched away once she reaches marriageable age, which is coming disturbingly soon. Other women in the book, such as Ida and Gum, married at just three years older than Harriet’s current age. Harriet does not like being put in a feminine box and assumed to be the same as other girls or women. She seems intent on fighting adult femininity for as long as possible, just like she’s intent on fighting the adult tendency to become resigned to how things are.
Harriet observes that “life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers—laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened” (479). She’s determined not to become like these adults and instead embraces her youthful determination to solve mysteries, change the world, and grant all her own wishes, such as eradicating loss and traveling into the past. Although Harriet still has this optimism halfway through the novel, by the end, even she knows that some things are mysteries, and there are limits to what’s possible.
Loss comes in many shapes and sizes, but Harriet learns that human life is filled with exponential loss. The adults in her life illustrate that losing oneself is a way of coping with loss, whether that be sleeping constantly or escaping through alcohol or drugs. Harriet’s method of losing herself is holding her breath underwater, which allows her to reach a trance-like state that she supposes is similar to death. However, when confronted with death, she lets go of this naivety and realizes she wants to live, representing one last step toward maturity.
The Dangers of Revisionist History
Members of the Cleve family share a strong revisionist impulse, which they apply to American history as well as to events from their personal memories. This revisionist impulse is not always borne of ill intentions; sometimes, the Cleves are trying to make sense of things, ease the pain of loss, or create a more entertaining story. However, revising history and memory is shown to be dangerous. When a made-up story takes the place of truth, everyone who believes the story is left adrift, unable to make informed decisions, process facts, or move forward in life. Ironically, the Cleves think that they have not applied their revisionist impulses to Robin’s death by avoiding the subject instead. The narrator remarks that, “Strong as the Cleves’ revisionist instincts were, there was no plot to be imposed on these fragments, no logic to be inferred, no lesson in hindsight, no moral to this story” (19)—without a way to find a nicer truth, they decide it is better to keep silent on the topic. In actuality, this lack of communication about Robin’s death is in itself a revision. All events of that day start to fade from memory, and in place of memory, Harriet is left with myth as her brother is rendered into a magical, mysterious, almost religious figure. Perhaps due to this false impression of her brother, Harriet wants nothing more than to have him back or find out who murdered him.
Harriet’s family members either don’t remember anything useful or won’t tell her anything about Robin’s death. While they believe that avoiding the topic is helpful to Charlotte, she is struggling due to never processing the trauma or getting closure. She even blames herself for Robin’s death, having no one to talk it through with and assuming it wouldn’t have happened if she’d adhered to the traditional Mother’s Day party time. Now, the family’s silence and erasure also hurt Harriet, who attaches monumental significance to any “clue” she’s able to discover. Learning that Ida dislikes the Ratliff children, that Danny was around the day Robin died, and that the Ratliffs commit crimes as a family, Harriet decides Danny must have been the killer and embarks on a fruitless mission to kill him. Her fixation on Danny is due to miscommunication, which is a major effect of revisionist history. Moreover, the fact that the murder remains unsolved could also easily be due to miscommunications or omissions.
The dangers of revisionist history are also shown through the family’s revision of American history with respect to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and its aftermath. They construct the convenient narrative that the loss of their fortune was the fault of Northerners, Black people, and/or working-class white people, and not at all a result of poor choices made by their family members such as Judge Cleve and his ancestors. This may ease their own pain in a way, but it is also dangerous because it prevents the family from taking responsibility for their own actions, learning from their mistakes, or growing into better versions of themselves. Ironically, Edie accuses working-class white people of almost this exact same problem, revealing the family’s tendency to revise their actions to represent themselves more positively:
The poor white has nothing to blame for his station but his own character […] that […] would mean having to assume some responsibility for his own laziness and sorry behavior. No, he’d much rather stomp around burning crosses […] than […] get an education or improve himself in any way (146).
Edie also maintains that the Civil War was about “States’ Rights,” ignoring the more serious issue of human rights. The Cleve family has revised American history to make themselves into the victims of the Civil War and its aftermath because although they still have more money and resources than most people, they have less than they did in the past. In obsessing over her family’s lost wealth, she ignores the fact that such wealth was only possible by enslaving others. The danger of this revisionist history carries through into the present as the Cleve family continues to exploit women of color to make their own lives more luxurious. As with other examples, the family’s inability to honestly confront the past leaves them doomed to repeat unhealthy or discriminatory actions.
The Pain of Truth and Mystery
Harriet’s maturation process is painful due to excessive loss and the difficult truths that she learns. One of the most painful truths of all is that some things are mysteries beyond explanation or human comprehension. When Harriet questions her family about Robin, most of them shush her and send her away. Libby is the only one to offer real advice, but her advice is lost upon Harriet at the moment. This is because her advice is itself this painful truth: Some things are unsolvable mysteries, and Robin’s untimely death is one of those. For some of the family, the point is not how Robin died but God and the universe’s injustice in allowing such a young boy to die a violent death. However, Harriet is nonetheless fixated on solving the mystery of Robin’s death, and she interprets Libby’s advice as just another example of an adult who has given up on trying to get any answers or improve the way things are.
Harriet’s family is well aware of the pain of truth, which motivates them to revise history and memory until the story suits their liking. For example, they pretend that the family used to be wealthier than they really were and that their financial loss was the fault of Northerners, poor people, or people of color. They rely on this revisionist history because acknowledging the truth would force them to confront their family’s history of racist exploitation, which they are not prepared to do. Similarly, unable to translate Robin’s death into a palatable story, they ignore the topic or, in Libby’s case, designate it as a mystery. People conceal truths such as Libby’s death or Dix’s affair in an attempt to ease their pain or prolong their blissful ignorance. While truths like these do cause pain, prolonged ignorance does not lessen this pain, represented in Charlotte’s years-long depression and the house’s unacknowledged deterioration.
Harriet finds the mystery of her brother’s death impossible to bear, and she pours all her energy into solving his murder. However, her inability to accept that there are no answers leads her to arrive at an incorrect conclusion, which she is nonetheless sure is correct. When a loved one is murdered, many families want to find out who killed them so they can get closure. When a death goes unexplained, this makes it nearly impossible for the family to process, but the heedless desire for answers can lead to shoddy investigations that only lead to more untruths. Harriet realizes the fruitlessness of her pursuit as she lies sick in the hospital, having nearly killed someone and nearly died herself. As Harriet comes to terms with Robin’s death remaining unsolved, the narrative stresses the value of accepting the unknown and moving on rather than living in the past and trying to answer impossible questions.
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By Donna Tartt
