50 pages • 1 hour read
W. Bruce CameronA Dog's Purpose
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Purpose in Life and How It Dictates Certain Actions
The idea of purpose in one’s life is clearly a major theme in the novel as it appears in the title, A Dog’s Purpose. From his very first moments, the dog who is known by many names, but who we’ll call Bailey, understands that there must be a purpose to his existence. In his first life, purpose is difficult for him to understand because his life is short and tragic. Yet, he comes to understand that humans play a significant role in a dog’s life. His first clear understanding of this is illustrated when he says, “[M]y life would be what he decided it would be” (62). Bailey comes to this conclusion when a man picks him up off the side of the road at the beginning of his second life, and Bailey offers unbridled trust, unaware that the man is about to leave him to die of heat exhaustion in a locked truck. This reliance on humans, for better or for worse, is the first lesson Bailey learns in his search for purpose.
Over the course of his second life, the first life in which Bailey lives to adulthood, he learns many lessons, most of which center on the role of a dog as a pet. Bailey also learns that protecting his human is an essential part of the dog/human relationship. This lesson is built upon in Bailey’s next life when he becomes a search-and-rescue dog. Each lesson learned in one life carries on to the next, allowing Bailey to expand upon his knowledge and gain more understanding of what his purpose truly is. By the end of his third life, Bailey reaches the conclusion that he has been given life three times in order to protect and save humans. When he returns for a fourth life, he is frustrated that his purpose in life has not been fulfilled. Yet, this life brings him full circle, back to the first boy to show him unconditional love. When Bailey returns to Ethan, he again uses what he learned in his previous life to bring joy and love to Ethan’s life by reuniting him with his childhood girlfriend.
Bailey’s drive, his whole reason for moving forward, is to find his purpose and fulfill it. However, Bailey isn’t the only character in the novel searching for purpose. Each of the characters has a purpose they believe they are meant to pursue, and each does their best to achieve this purpose. The very first humans Bailey meets, Senora and Carlos, believe their purpose is to rescue as many dogs as possible. However, they fail in their purpose because they disregard the laws of their county and their dogs are taken away. The second human who has an impact on Bailey’s life is Ethan. The early chapters that feature Ethan show him as a young boy whose only purpose is to grow up to be the best man he can be. This purpose is derailed when Ethan is injured in a house fire set by his neighbor, Todd—but Ethan shows strength of character when he doesn’t allow this event to sideline him for long. When Bailey leaves Ethan, he is a college student pursuing the future he had planned on, just in a different way.
Bailey’s third life brings him first to Jakob and then to Maya. Jakob is a man who feels as though he has lost his purpose when his wife died. He is filled with sadness and moving through life without any real hope or motivation. However, when Bailey meets Jakob after a lengthy separation, Jakob has remarried and become a father. Jakob found his purpose in starting a new family. Maya is a patrol officer who decides to change the focus of her career by becoming part of the search-and-rescue team but struggles because she does not believe she is physically fit enough to keep up with her duties. Furthermore, Maya is a single woman with low self-esteem, struggling to love herself, let alone another person. However, once she meets Bailey and begins to fight for their partnership, she finds purpose. Maya’s successes give her confidence, and this leads to a relationship and eventually a family.
The end of the novel brings Bailey full circle, struggling to understand what his purpose is. When Bailey returns to Ethan, he takes all the things he has learned through his many lives and uses them to bring happiness to Ethan once more. Ethan has lived the life he thought he should, received an education and experienced success in business, but never married. Bailey arranges for Ethan to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart, not only bringing Ethan’s story full circle but also bringing Bailey back to the first lesson he learned—that dogs and humans are interdependent on one another in order to fulfill their purpose in life.
Interpersonal Relationships and How a Dog Might Learn From Them
Although Bailey doesn’t fully understand them, there are human relationships going on all around him. The first human relationship that Bailey is introduced to is the relationship between Senora and Carlos. Although young Bailey never truly understands the nature of their relationship, it is clear to the reader that there is loyalty between the couple, as Carlos continues to do everything Senora asks even though he knows it will lead to disaster. In Bailey’s second life, he is a witness to the relationship between Ethan's parents, unaware that their marriage is struggling even as he notes the fights they often have and the decision on the father’s part to move out of the marital bedroom. The failing relationship contrasts with the long-lasting relationship between Ethan’s grandparents and the young love Bailey witnesses between Ethan and Hannah. Overall, positive relationships like that between Ethan and Hannah leave their mark; even after years of separation, Bailey recognizes not only Ethan’s but also Hannah’s scent on one of Hannah’s daughters. Bailey remembers Hannah as a friendly human and associates her with Ethan’s own happiness.
However, not all of the human relationships Bailey witnesses are romantic. Todd’s relationship with just about everyone in the neighborhood is tense and made uncomfortable by Todd’s penchant for violence and deception. Even Bailey feels uncomfortable around Todd, enough so that he becomes better equipped to deal with ill-intentioned humans as a search-and-rescue dog. When Bailey meets Jakob, his first handler during his search-and-rescue days, it is clear that Jakob has few close relationships with anyone outside of his work colleagues because of the grief that has taken over his life since the death of his wife—which is later alleviated by his remarriage. Then there’s Maya, Bailey’s second handler, and her many relationships with her large family—in addition to her romance with neighbor Al. Bailey gets to witness relationships of many kinds over the course of his many lives. At the same time, Bailey himself experiences different kinds of relationships, some strictly professional like his relationship with Jakob and many filled with a great deal of mutual affection, such as his relationships with Ethan, Hannah, Maya, and Al. It is through these relationships, no matter the nature of them, that Bailey learns and is able to put lessons toward his understanding of his purpose in life. He learns to adapt to his different owners’ needs and displays an evolving sense of empathy in doing so.
Death as Passage to the Next Life
Bailey lives four lives over the course of the novel. In order to live so many lives, Bailey must die at the end of them. His first death is tragic in that he is still a puppy when he is put down, simply because he has an injury that will likely prevent a quick adoption. His second life, however, is a long and fulfilling one, a life he lives with the boy he loves. When Bailey grows old and becomes ill, he is aware that his death is coming and, although sad to leave Ethan behind, is grateful for the peace that comes with passing from one life to whatever comes next. However, for Bailey, what comes next is rebirth and a new life. His third life is different from his previous two because he is born female and not adopted to be a pet; Bailey (as Ellie) is instead trained as a search-and-rescue dog. This life, too, is a long and fulfilling one that leaves Bailey content that he has fulfilled his purpose through his work of rescuing humans; the dog is convinced that this life is truly the end. Yet, death does not deliver Bailey to whatever comes next, instead bringing him back to life as another dog.
Death is treated humanely in this novel, with Bailey dying three times at the hand of a veterinarian. For Bailey, death is only unattended once, and this is in his first life before he can truly understand what is happening. In his second life, Bailey dies surrounded by the family he loves and who love him unconditionally. His death in his third life is similar, attended by Maya and Al, the two most important people to him in this life. There is love in death for Bailey, as well as kindness and compassion. At the end of the novel, however, the death Bailey attends is not his own, but Ethan’s. Bailey does for Ethan what Ethan previously did for him: He sits by Ethan’s side and offers comfort in his final moments. The similarities cannot be denied, and they again stress that a dog’s life is undeniably dependent on the humans around him and vice versa, calling back to the first lesson Bailey ever learned. As for Ethan himself, death is framed as a means of lucidity, as in his final moments, he seems to recognize new dog “Buddy” as his first dog Bailey. Rather than framing death as frightening in its uncertainty, the novel takes care to make it a single step in one’s life, one that may be uncertain but doesn’t have to be seen to alone: In this moment, the older Ethan and Bailey have each other and their memories together.
