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
As Lenù and her friends arrive at the reception, they struggle to find a place where they can all sit together. Lenù’s mother calls her over and asks why “crazy” Melina’s son is always hanging around her. She implies that she knows the truth about Antonio—and she demands that Lenù sit with her during the party. Lenù begrudgingly takes her seat at her parents’ table. When the band starts playing, Lenù attempts to get up and go sit with her friends again, but her mother again restrains her. Lenù feels that her mother wants two things at once: to keep her near and thus confined to a life like her own, and to send her to school where she can improve her station in life. Both things, Lenù knows, are not possible at once.
Lenù is confounded by her mother’s desire to keep her close. Even as her mother supports her pursuit of an education, a move which would seem to signal that she wants better for her daughter, her mother also longs to keep her close—a fact which fills Lenù with the old fear of transforming into her mother in spite of all her efforts to escape the woman’s shadow.
Themes
As Lila and Stefano enter the room, Lenù’s existential crisis deepens. She has always looked to Lila to determine how together they might escape their mothers and their neighborhood—now, though, Lenù sees that Lila has resigned herself to making the best of the directive to stay in one place. Lenù feels isolated from everyone around her. As she watches Lila dance, she laments that Lila has failed to escape—and she becomes firm in her own resolve to escape no matter the cost. When Nino, Alfonso, and Marisa enter the room, Lenù jumps up from the table and, struggling against her mother as she pulls at Lenù’s dress, goes to join them at their table.
Lenù is disheartened to realize that Lila has taken a path which binds her to a traditional life as a wife and mother in the neighborhood of their youth. Lenù has always looked to Lila as an example of how to be and what to aspire to—now, though, she feels lost, alone, and saddened by her friend’s resignation to an ordinary path.
Themes
