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 rock fight, Lila begins subjecting Lenù to “proofs of courage” during their interactions at school, in the courtyard, and throughout the neighborhood. One afternoon, while playing with their dolls, Lila pushes Lenù’s doll Tina into the cellar grate. Though Lenù feels “unbearable sorrow” at the loss of the doll, she holds back her emotions. Lila asks Lenù if she doesn’t care, after all, about her doll. Lenù refuses to answer—she feels that to give the wrong answer and lose Lila would be even worse than losing Tina. In response, Lenù simply throws Lila’s doll Nu into the cellar. “What you do, I do,” she remarks stoically, to Lila’s amazement.
In this passage, as Lila and Lenù test the boundaries of their friendship, Lenù openly declares her intention to mold her life around Lila’s choices. It is a bold declaration that is as vulnerable as it is assertive. It’s also significant that Lenù’s retributive, mirrorlike behavior toward Lila also reflects the ways in which the men of the neighborhood seek to replicate one another’s actions as they pursue honor and dominance. Lenù has likely learned such patterns by witnessing them as they unfold all around her.
Themes
The girls resolve to go down to the cellar and fetch their dolls together. Though terrified of going into the dank space, they stick together as they grope their way through the dark crawlspace. Lenù imagines horrible things all around her and startles at the sight of a gas mask, a relic from the war, hanging on the hook. Lila helps to calm Lenù down, and the girls continue searching for their dolls but have no luck. As the girls walk back out of the cellar, Lila announces that Don Achille has taken the dolls and hidden them away in his black bag. Terrified, Lenù runs for the light of the courtyard.
The girls are both afraid of Don Achille, though they believe him to be a more literal monster than he actually is. The depth of their fears reflects the depths of their community’s fears of Don Achille and the things he can do with impunity.
Themes
