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
After the ceremony, everyone stands in the church courtyard. Lenù is shocked to realize that Alfonso and Marisa are together, and she wonders if they have made their relationship official. As Lenù spots Nino looking shabby and uncomfortable in the church courtyard, she feels that his presence adds to the “emotional disorder” of the day. She greets him perfunctorily, but Antonio grabs her and leads her off with their friends toward Pasquale’s old car so that they can all drive to the restaurant. Antonio, sensing a change in mood as they drive, asks Lenù what’s wrong; Carmela suggests that Lenù is jealous that Lila is married.
Lenù wants to spend time with Nino—she is in love with him and she feels that he represents the intellectual life she wants to lead. However, she keeps getting dragged back into her old friend group—a pattern that begins to feel more and more like a threat considering Lila’s surrender to the ordinary path of becoming a wife.
Themes
During the car ride, as Pasquale speeds along the avenues and their friends all laugh, Lenù feels completely alien. She is on a different path from them all—when she is with her old friends, she must put aside all she’s learned in school or else use it against them to mar herself as better than them. Lila, the only person who has ever mattered to Lenù, is no longer a part of their group, and now Lenù feels no kinship with these people—especially not with Antonio, whom she knows she is supposed to love.
Lila’s wedding has thrown Lenù into an existential crisis. Without Lila, Lenù feels that nothing bonds her to her old friend group or their shared past. Lenù is disdainful of the average lives her old schoolmates will lead—she wants bigger and better things, and she’s terrified of being the only person who does.
Themes
