Previous
Chapter 3
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Friends, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Friendship
The Value of Art
Loss and Grief
Substance Abuse
Summary
Analysis
Twenty-five year ago, the 14-year-old boys who inspired The One of the Sea are sitting on a fishing pier. This will be one of the most important summers of their life, although at the time, they won’t realize that they’re inspiring a C. Jat painting. The teenagers have had hard lives and seen more violence than the people at the art auction 25 years later ever will, although when they’re together, they feel happy and make one another laugh.
The opening of this chapter reveals that the painting The One of the Sea was inspired by something real (or, at least, something real within the fictional world of this book). The novel suggests that art can be a way of preserving the past and of giving voice to people like these teenagers, who have had difficult lives, but who become preserved in a piece of art that endures through the ages.
Active
Themes
Joar, one of the boys, reads an ad in the newspaper one morning about a competition for young artists, where the winning painting will be hung in a museum. He brings his idea to his friends, who laugh at it and don’t take it seriously. One of his friends, known at the artist, eventually says that while he can paint, he can’t do it in a fancy way that wins competitions. Joar gets angry and tells the artist to just paint the sea—it’s one color, so it should be easy. The artist says he’ll never be able to find enough paper to paint the whole sea, and eventually they all start to laugh.
Joar has very simple ideas about art, suggesting that the sea is only one color and so that should make it easy to paint. While his art knowledge is limited, his confidence nevertheless helps encourage the artist. Context clues make it clear that “the artist” is probably C. Jat, but the novel doesn’t use his name in the past, suggesting that young C. Jat was a different person than who he eventually became.
Active
Themes
Joar tells the artist he’ll be world-famous someday, and it turns out Joar is right. When the artist asks if they’ll still be best friends as adults, Joar says he doesn’t think they’ll all still be alive, which is he right about too.
Active
Themes
