Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity, Ethnicity, and Masculinity
Silence and Trauma vs. Communication
Family and Coming of Age
Intellectualism and Emotion vs. Physical Strength
Summary
Analysis
Ari gets up every day and sits in his truck. He feels optimistic sitting in the driver’s seat, listening to the radio. One morning, Mom joins Ari and asks where he’s going to take the truck the first time he gets to drive it. Ari says that he’s going to take it to the desert alone to look at stars. Mom asks who Ileana is when she sees the name on Ari’s cast, but Ari says she’s too pretty for him. That night, Ari dreams that he’s driving Ileana in his pickup. He doesn’t see Dante in the road and can’t stop the truck.
This dream implies that Ari shouldn’t actually be pursuing Ileana, and that she’s a distraction from Ari’s real project of discovering how to best engage with Dante and his true identity as a young gay man. Hitting Dante with the pickup shows Ari that if he leans too heavily on a particular version of adulthood and masculinity, he can horribly destroy their friendship.
Themes
The next morning, Mom invites Ari to join her on the front steps. They discuss that Dad is going to start teaching Ari to drive in a few weeks. Mom asks if Ari misses Dante. Ari doesn’t know, and says that Dante hovers like Mom, and that he likes to be alone. She says that Ari was screaming for Dante last night, but Ari refuses to talk about his dream. He decides to tell her some of the truth: in his dream, he was driving in the rain and hit Dante. He says he wishes he smoked. Mom threatens to take the truck away if he does, and asks Ari to break rules behind her back if he breaks them. Ari thinks about his whole dream: he hit Dante because he’d been looking at Ileana.
While being alone isn’t necessarily a bad thing—there’s a difference between being lonely and being alone. For instance, the fact that Ari yells for Dante in his sleep, when he’s alone, makes it clear that Ari is leaning on his solitude in an attempt to ignore bigger and scarier facts about his life an who he is. Mom’s request that Ari keep any rule breaking a secret shows that she respects where Ari is in his development. He needs independence to experiment, but she can protect herself by not knowing about it.
Themes
