The Little Friend

“The mysterious, conflicted circumstances of Robin’s death were not subject to this alchemy. Strong as the Cleves’ revisionist instincts were, there was no plot to be imposed on these fragments, no logic to be inferred, no lesson in hindsight, no moral to this story.”

The narrator points out the Pain of Truth and Mystery by discussing the ways Robin’s death differs from other familial narratives. Storytelling relies on internal logic, and the family contorts historical facts to fit their preferred logic, blaming their current financial state on oppressed groups, for example. However, there is no logic to a child being murdered, and so they cannot contort Robin’s death into a more pleasant form. Since the family is unaccustomed to dealing with the truth, no one has coped with Robin’s death.

“But his younger sisters, who had never in any proper sense known him at all, nonetheless grew up certain of their brother’s favorite color (red); his favorite book (The Wind in the Willows) and his favorite character in it (Mr. Toad); his favorite flavor of ice cream (chocolate) and his favorite baseball team (the Cardinals) and a thousand other things which they—being living children, and preferring chocolate ice cream one week and peach the next—were not even sure they knew about themselves.”

This quote illustrates the theme of Maturation as Loss, using Robin, who is dead, as a counterpoint. Life itself entails constant change, and change always comes with some type of loss or other. The only way to escape loss and become unchanging or immutable, like Robin, is to die.

“The Cleves, like most old families in Mississippi, had once been richer than they were. As with vanished Pompeii, only traces of these riches remained, and they liked to tell, among themselves, stories of their lost fortune. Some of them were true. The Yankees had indeed stolen some of the Cleves’ jewelry and silver, though not the vast treasures the sisters sighed for […] Actually, it was Judge Cleve who had destroyed the house […] he had no repairs done on it for nearly seventy years, nor had his mother for forty years before.

This quote introduces Tribulation as a symbol for Harriet’s family’s glorification of the past. This illustrates The Dangers of Revisionist History; inheriting the fragments of her family’s history, Harriet begins to construct her own disastrous narrative. The word “tribulation” refers to a state of suffering, and the house’s name is therefore ironic; no matter how great it once was, it was ultimately rotten since its existence was due to slavery.

“Harriet’s favorite picture […] was of her and Robin and Allison in the parlor of Tribulation, beside the Christmas tree. It was the only picture, so far as she knew, of the three of them together […] It communicated no sense whatever of the many dooms which were about to fall. […] [I]t was Christmas, there was a new baby in the house, everybody was happy and thought they would be happy forever.”

Harriet feels like because Robin is dead, he is frozen in time before all this loss occurred. She envies his ability to live free of that loss; since she is still a child, she doesn’t comprehend that being dead is not enviable. For Harriet, photographs also come to symbolize the past and a time prior to loss. Since her life has been defined by Robin’s death, it’s hard for her to imagine a time before it.

“Christ’s own passage—aptly—was described as a Mystery, yet people were queerly uninterested in getting to the bottom of it. […] This was Harriet’s greatest obsession, and the one from which all the others sprang. For what she wanted—more than Tribulation, more than anything—was to have her brother back. Next to that, she wanted to know who killed him.”

By romanticizing her deceased brother and effectively comparing him to Jesus, adults in Harriet’s life have created a version of Robin that is so amazing and mysterious that Harriet wants him back more than anything. Christianity necessitates a belief in “the impossible” but nobody seems to actually understand it. Harriet wants to learn how to do this, but as it turns out, that is also impossible. Not only can she not bring her brother back, but even if she could apprehend the killer, she still wouldn’t understand why God would let someone murder Robin, especially when he was a young child who didn’t do anything to provoke anyone.

“Joan of Arc had led armies when she was hardly older than Harriet. Yet, for Christmas last year, her father had given her an insulting board game for girls called What Shall I Be? It was a particularly flimsy game, meant to offer career guidance but no matter how well you played, it offered only four possible futures: teacher, ballerina, mother, or nurse.”

This quote illustrates the gendered nature of Maturation as Loss. For Harriet as a girl, maturation involves a narrowing down of possibilities, and an end to the relative freedom she was allowed as a prepubescent child. Disgusted with the possibilities offered to her, she turns her attention to “the impossible,” from finding Robin’s killer to holding her breath underwater for longer stretches of time. By escaping her grief, she might escape her fate as a woman.

“‘A poor Negro has at least the excuse of his birth,’ Edie said. ‘The poor white has nothing to blame for his station but his own character. Well, of course, that won’t do. That would mean having to assume some responsibility for his own laziness and sorry behavior. No, he’d much rather stomp around burning crosses and blaming the Negro for everything than go out and try to get an education or improve himself in any way.’”

Edie criticizes working-class white people, whom she views as different from herself, for blaming their problems on others rather than taking responsibility for their actions. Ironically, Edie herself does this regularly, like when she blames the loss of her family’s fortune on working-class white people, Black people, and Northerners.

“Some parts of The Jungle Book she knew almost by heart: Mowgli’s lessons with Bagheera and Baloo; the attack, with Kaa, upon the Bandarlog. Later, less adventurous parts—in which Mowgli began to be dissatisfied with his life in the jungle—she often did not read at all. She did not care for children’s books in which the children grew up, as what ‘growing up’ entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character.”

Tartt uses literary allusion to compare growing up to an adventure story. Harriet, still a child, is drawn to the fantastical and pushes away more realistic plot points. She resists the coming-of-age process because she doesn’t want to close off possibilities and experience more loss. Ironically, by insisting upon believing in the impossible goal of apprehending and killing her brother’s murderer, Harriet “grows up” beyond her years by exposing herself to incredible violence and trauma and encountering painful adult truths.

“The nightgown she had on was very old, with flimsy ice-blue skirts and ribbons at the throat. When Harriet was small, she had been captivated by it because it looked like the Blue Fairy’s gown in her book of Pinocchio. Now, it just looked old: wilted, gone gray at the seams.”

Once again, Tartt alludes to a fairy tale to illustrate Harriet’s coming-of-age; the once whimsical is now old and joyless. The process of Maturation as Loss does not occur at a single moment for Harriet but is rather a process that unfolds over time. Sometimes, she doesn’t even realize there’s been a loss until it’s already gone, such as now, when her mother’s nightgown has lost its ethereal quality.

“It was the main lesson in life she had drilled into her grandsons: not to expect much from the world. The world was a mean place, dog eat dog (to quote another of her mean sayings). If any of her boys expected too much, or rose above themselves, they would get their hopes knocked down and broken. But in Danny’s view, this wasn’t much of a lesson.”

Gum Ratliff, the boys’ grandmother, complicates the theme of Maturation as Loss. She’s learned not to expect things; that way there will be less disappointment. However, this advice is itself lost, falling on ears that aren’t ready to hear it. The Ratliff boys each try and fail to break free from their working-class lives, but none of them are able to escape.

“The house itself wouldn’t be different when Ida left. Traces of her presence had always been faint. There was the bottle of dark Karo syrup she kept in the pantry, to pour on her biscuits; there was the red plastic drinking glass that she filled with ice on summer mornings and carried around to drink from during the day. (Harriet’s parents didn’t like Ida to drink from the regular kitchen glasses; it made Harriet ashamed even to think about it). There was the apron Ida kept out on the back porch; there were the snuff cans filled with tomato seedlings, and the vegetable patch by the house.

And that was all.”

This quote reveals the racial prejudice on the part of Harriet’s parents, who insist on few of Ida’s “traces” being left after she leaves the house. It also reveals Harriet’s lack of appreciation for what Ida does. In reality, the house does become different after Ida leaves because nobody is cleaning, doing laundry, or cooking very often. This shows how domestic work (often done by women and people of color) is often invisible because it’s only noticed when it’s no longer being done.

“What they’d aimed for, and struck, in the depthless glare off the overpass, was not so much the car itself as a point of no return: time a rear view mirror now, and past rushing backward to the vanishing point. Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn’t take her back—not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days. And that was tough, as Hely would say. Tough: since back was the way she wanted to go, since the past was the only place she wanted to be.”

The novel contains points of no return as a recurring motif. Various characters reflect at certain moments that they’ve made a giant mistake or that there is no going back. This illustrates Maturation as Loss in the sense that big decisions always open up certain possibilities while closing off others. Since time only moves forward and not backward, the matrix of available choices constantly shifts but also seems to shrink because although past options are no longer available, they’re still “visible” in memory (which may or may not even be truthful).

“Even Hely felt like something that was lost now, or about to be lost, an impermanence like lightning bugs or summer. The light in the narrow hallway was almost completely gone. And without Hely’s voice—tinny and faint as it was—to break the gloom, her sorrow blackened and roared up like a cataract.”

Harriet views Maturation as Loss, and to her, the process will only continue to get worse for the rest of her life. The gap in maturation between her and Hely causes another loss—distance is created between them because Hely can barely comprehend the most basic of losses. Tartt uses simile here to compare Harriet’s loss to other impermanent things in nature, like a flashing lightning bug or the changing seasons. Another simile compares her grief to a cataract, implying that as she ages, she will never see things the same way again.

“‘We’re certainly in Jones County now!’ said Edie gaily […] ‘Do you remember old Newt Knight the deserter from your Mississippi History, Harriet? The Robin Hood of the Piney Woods, so he called himself! He and his men were poor and sorry, and they didn’t want to fight a rich man’s war so they hold up down here in the backwoods and wouldn’t have a thing to do with the Confederacy […] They were too poor to have any slaves themselves, and they resented those rich enough to have them. So they seceded from the Secession! Hoeing their sorry little corn patches out here in the pine woods! Of course, they didn’t understand that the war was really about States’ Rights.’”

Here, Edie applies the family’s revisionist tendencies to a more generalized history of the Civil War and its aftermath. The allusion to Robin Hood belies the false history; insisting that the Civil War was about states’ rights is as much a fairy tale as Robin Hood. Edie erases the real history of human rights violations and enslavement to perpetuate her preferred narrative.

“Harriet stared at them and thought about the pool at the country club: the blue light, how absolutely soundless was the world when she slipped underwater on a deep breath. You can be there now, she told herself, you can be there if you think hard enough.”

Throughout the text, Harriet tells herself to stop thinking whenever her thoughts become too uncomfortable. Now, she changes her strategy and tries to harness the power of thought to bring her to a thoughtless place. Her belief in the impossible is starting to dwindle as she runs out of ways to access it.

“Time was broken. Harriet’s way of measuring it was gone. Before, Ida was the planet whose round marked the house and her bright old reliable course (washing on Mondays and mending on Tuesdays, sandwiches in summer and soup in winter) ruled every aspect of Harriet’s life. The weeks revolved in procession, each day a series of sequential vistas […]

But all this was gone. Without Ida, time dilated and sank into a vast, shimmering emptiness. Hours and days, and light and darkness, slid into each other unremarked; there was no difference any more between lunch and breakfast, week-end and week-day, dawn or dusk; and it was like living deep in a cave lit by artificial lights.”

This shows the incredible significance of Ida in Harriet’s life and the weight of loss Harriet feels now that Ida’s gone. The loss is so profound that Harriet’s concept of time itself changes and she feels adrift. At the same time, this quote shows how the Cleve family dehumanizes Ida; to Harriet, Ida is a series of tasks—washing, mending, and meals—rather than a full person.

“Underwater, Harriet enjoyed having something heavy to fight and kick against, enjoyed the white Frankenstein arcs of electricity leaping—as from some great generator—against the walls of the pool. Suspended there—in chains and spangled of radiance, ten feet above the bellying curve of the deep end—sometimes she forgot herself for whole minutes at a time, lost in echoes and silence, ladders of blue light.”

The color blue symbolizes the impermanence of the mythologized past where everyone was happy and nothing was yet lost. Harriet longs for the impossibility of returning to this dream that never existed in the first place, but the only way to escape loss is to forget she’s alive by entering a sort of trance. This is a temporary escape, but it bears resemblance to what Harriet imagines death will be like.

“The only thing that gave Harriet a sense of purpose was the idea of Danny Ratliff […]

In her bedroom, in the fading light, she lay on the carpet, staring at the flimsy black-and-white photograph she’d scissored from the yearbook. Its casual, off-centered quality—which had shocked her at first—had long since burned away and now what she saw when she looked at the picture was not a boy or even a person, but the frank embodiment of evil. His face had grown so poisonous to her that now she wouldn’t even touch the photograph except to pick it up by the edges. The despair of her house was the work of his hand. He deserved to die.”

The narrator recognizes that Harriet’s perception of Danny has mutated beyond what is really there: He has s become more of a concept than a human, and Harriet has attached too much significance to him. This shows the Dangers of Revisionist History, as Harriet’s obsession with the past results in her dehumanizing another person. At this juncture, no matter what happens with Danny, it will end disappointingly for Harriet: either she’ll fail to kill him, or she’ll kill him and then discover that evil continues to exist in the world. Moreover, she’ll also learn that killing him will not bring Robin back, lessen her loss, or prevent future losses.

“With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers—laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. ‘That’s life.’ That’s what they all said. ‘That’s life, Harriet, that’s just how it is, you’ll see.’

Well: Harriet would not see. She was young still, and the chains had not yet grown tight around her ankles.”

The Cleve, Dufresnes, and Ratliff elders all try to temper their losses and disappointment by managing their expectations. Their advice is lost on the younger generation, who want either impossible futures or the impossible pasts that were made up by the elder generation. Harriet sees the way adults try to escape reality and vows to be different, but she is susceptible to her own modes of escape like crafting new realities.

“When Tribulation caught fire—a fire that lit up the night sky for miles around—Danny’s father and grandmother shook their heads with sly, amused gravity, as if they had known all along that such a house must burn. They could not help but relish the spectacle of ‘the high and mighty’ brought down a notch or two, and Gum resented Tribulation in particular, since as a girl she’d picked cotton in its fields.”

This illustrates Tribulation as a symbol of the past that the Cleves glorify and mourn but that others who were oppressed by it are glad to see end. It is vaguely implied that the Ratliffs could have burned the house because they “knew” it would burn and because they’ve burned other buildings, but by this point, the house had already been sold and converted into apartments, so it was “lost” to the Cleves already. The reference to cotton picking reiterates that the Cleve family’s wealth was created by enslaving others.

“He was chilled by the sudden appearance, in the foreground, of a smaller, hunchbacked sort of creature, all in black, which—megaphone in hand—stopped in its soggy, squelchy walk to observe him from the sidewalk. It was something like a small black goblin—scarcely three feet tall, with orange beak and big orange feet, and a strangely drenched look. As the car went by, it turned in a smooth tracking motion and opened its black wings like a bat…and Danny had the uncanny sensation that he’d met it before, this creature, part blackbird, part dwarf, part devilish child; that somehow (despite the improbability of such a thing) he remembered it from somewhere. Even stranger: that it remembered him. And as he glanced in the rear view mirror he saw it again, a small black form with black wings, looking after his car like an unwelcome little messenger from the other world.”

Tartt uses foreboding, animalistic, and fantastical imagery in this scene. The child wearing Robin’s raven costume symbolizes an omen for Danny and foreshadows the doom that awaits if he continues down his current path. However, this is lost on Danny because he’s too narrow-minded in his focus on the goal at hand. The fantastical language used to describe a child in a costume highlights the way narratives can spin out of control and distort the truth.

“They drove past the old Alexandria Hotel, with its sagging porch and rotten shutters—haunted, people said, and no wonder, all the people who had died there; you could feel it radiating from the place, all that old historical death. And Danny wanted to howl at the universe that had dumped him here: in this hell-hole town, in this broken-down county that hadn’t seen money since the Civil War. His first felony conviction hadn’t even been his fault: it was his father’s, for sending him to steal a ridiculously expensive Stihl chainsaw from the workshop of a rich old German farmer who was sitting up guarding his property with a gun. It was pathetic now, to think back on how he’d looked forward to his release from jail, counting the days until he got to go home, because the thing he hadn’t understood then (he was happier not knowing it) was that once you were in prison, you never got out. People treated you like a different person; you tended to backslide, the way people tended to backslide into malaria or bad alcoholism. The only thing for it was to go someplace that nobody knew you and nobody knew your family and try to start your life all over again.

Street signs repeating, and words. Natchez, Natchez, Natchez, Natchez. Chamber of Commerce: ALEXANDRIA: THE WAY THINGS OUGHT TO BE! No, not the way things ought to be, Danny thought bitterly; it’s the way things fucking are.”

Danny, as a working-class person, is aware that Alexandria is not great, nor was it ever—he doesn’t romanticize Alexandria’s past. However, he still constructs a false narrative by assuming that things will be better somewhere else and that the answer to happiness is to escape his family and hometown. This is emphasized through Danny’s reflections on prison and the way society makes incarcerated people serve their sentences over and over, first in prison and then through decreased opportunities on the outside.

“I know what it feels like to die. If she opened her eyes, it would be to her own shadow (arms spread, a Christmas angel) shimmering blue on the floor of the swimming pool.”

Harriet has glorified the idea of Robin because he has access to secret knowledge that she, as a living human, is barred from. Namely, Robin knows what death is like and whether there’s such a thing as rebirth, resurrection, and an afterlife. Nearly drowning and entering a trance, Harriet gets close to death and thinks she has caught a glimpse of this secret knowledge. This feeling is undercut later when she is gravely ill.