Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Brilliant Friend, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Female Friendship
Masculine vs. Feminine Violence
Women’s Work
Poverty, Social Climbing, and Sacrifice
The Uses of Community
Love, Sex, and Strategy
Summary
Analysis
On December 31st of 1958, Elena writes, Lila would have her first episode of “dissolving margins”—a term she uses to describe “those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved.” Lila won’t tell Elena about the episode, however, until November of 1980, when both women are 36.
This passage pushes to the foreground an event that will take place later on in the narrative. Including it here allows Ferrante to foreshadow both the secrets Lila and Lenù keep throughout their lifelong friendship as well as the turbulent times soon to come their way.
Themes
Elena describes the evening of December 31st, 1958. Lila and Lenù, teenagers, sat on the roof terrace of an apartment building shivering in the low-cut dresses they wore to attract the attention of the boys around them. According to Lila’s later account, as the fireworks started going off, she began to sweat and feel nauseous—she started to believe that “something absolutely material which had been present around her […] forever” had suddenly revealed itself. Lila’s heart rate increased and she began to feel that the people and things around her were “poorly made.” Lila tried to calm herself, but her efforts failed as the sounds of nearby gunshots mingled with the noise of the fireworks. Most frighteningly of all, Lila felt she could perceive “unknown entities that broke down the outline of the world and demonstrated its terrifying nature.”
In relaying the details of Lila’s “dissolving margins” episode—an experience which may or may not be, a panic attack—Lenù shows how fragile the world around her and Lila truly is. As both young women confront the “boundaries” of their neighborhood, their families, and their friendship with each other, Elena implies that they will experience a breakdown of their separate understandings of the “nature” of the world.
Themes
