A Little Life: Motifs 3 key examples

Jude not only suffers at the hands of Father Gabriel and Dr. Traylor, but goes great lengths to hurt himself. The aftermath of Jude’s abuse is no less horrific than the perpetrators’ deeds themselves. With equally terrifying detail, A Little Life traces the cuts, tears, and infections that result from Jude's self-harm in the wake of trauma. Jude cannot live with the shame of his body, lacerating himself literally and figuratively. He imagines loosening “whole pyramids of flesh from his arms” or burning himself whole. Through one suicidal bout after another, his acts of self-destruction go against the instinctive, biological imperative to live.

And yet despite it all, the body offers a quieter narrative of resilience and regrowth. Wounds have closed over the places where he had been bruised and burned. After a failed suicide attempt, friends and loved ones rally to his side. When an infection develops in his lower legs, Jude gets prosthetics and gets spared its spreading. Improbably, he manages to live on. In bed, Willem marvels at “all the permutations flesh could take, at all the ways body healed itself, even when attempts had been made to destroy it.” Jude’s body becomes a microcosm of the novel itself, torn between the forces of mortality, cruel hardship, and survival.

Math—especially in its pursuit of reason—helps structure the characters’ conceptions of fate. “Life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss,” Harold reflects as he thinks of Jacob, and then of Jude. Surrounded by friends and love, his future son approaches the question in much the same way—Jude imagines his life “begging him to forgive it, as if it were piling riches upon him, smothering him in all things beautiful and wonderful and hoped-for so he wouldn’t resent it” in return for all his previous years of misfortune. Jude translates the principles of math to his own life, providing it with an arc he can follow.

But Jude over-relies on math’s promise of reason, and to his ultimate peril. Math, like legal theories, may only offer models that miss the imperfections of reality itself. A Little Life shows math’s cruelty, too, in which the desire to make sense of life denies self-forgiveness. Math’s over-rational approach to life breeds a kind of self-loathing. Its cosmic calculus of good balanced out by the bad leads to a cruel worldview with no room for redemption. “You must have done something very bad to be left behind like that,” the monastery brothers drill into Jude. Jude can only blame himself as he pieces together his past, shutting away grace or self-forgiveness. Math reaffirms the heartbreaking belief that his is somehow not deserving of love or dignity. “x = x,” he thinks, turning to the axiom of equality as he tumbles down the stairs from Caleb’s shove. “The person I was will always be the person I am.”

Amid change and sorrow, art unearths a deeper understanding of truth. Decades pass between the work’s opening pages and its last, during which people die and close friends drift apart. But creating art allows the novel’s characters to reach for that which eludes them. Notably, it provides JB—brash and self-absorbed—the opportunity to articulate everyday life in a new way. Jude’s roommate produces colors that made all other images seem “wan and flaccid by comparison,” and renders the world in his paintings with “empathy and tenderness and grace.” Even in its most unwanted forms, art distills something elemental: Jude must admit that JB’s portrait of him, however unwanted, captures a moment of pain “specific only to himself.” Like Willem’s movies or Richard’s dissolving sculptures, JB’s artwork communicates deeper truth through its form.

Art also creates order in a world where so little of it falls within the characters’ control. Malcolm brings Jude’s dream of a “cabin in the woods” to life, crystallizing “uncomplicated” beauty through the “Lantern” house at Garrison. Following Willem’s death, even Jude—the most practical of the roommates—turns to art to cope. He obsessively rewatches Willem’s past films and cradles the wooden bust of his lover. In his later stages of grief, he hallucinates Willem restored to life and addresses him “like two actors on a stage.” Gazing at JB’s portrait of Willem or gliding his fingers over his lover’s wooden “crest of hair,” Jude reckons with loss through art. As with Malcolm’s building models, art for Jude becomes partly a “reminder that for all the uncertainties of his life, there was one thing that he could manipulate perfectly."

JB, Willem, Jude, and Malcolm all die by the novel’s last chapter—the novel’s heartbreak lies in their early deaths. But their stories endure through the works they leave behind. After Jude’s suicide, Harold finds solace in JB’s portrait, Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story. Standing before the picture each night, Jude’s father speaks to Willem in a poignant coda to the work. It is as though, in this collection of many "little lives," art has still managed to memorialize them all—triumphs and tragedies alike.