47 pages • 1 hour read
Abbi GlinesUntil Friday Night
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Football
Content Warning: This section of the guide references the source text’s depiction of grief, trauma, and domestic violence that results in death.
Football is symbolic of community. The sport gives characters including West Ashby and Brady Higgens a sense of belonging and family. The characters’ teammates give them support and friendship. The sport also brings unlikely individuals together and lets them bond over a common interest.
For West, football offers him a support system when his dad gets sick. He doesn’t immediately take advantage of the team’s support because he fears exposing his vulnerability. By Chapter 28, he realizes that his football friends are there for him. After his dad dies, he comes out into the hall, “expecting it to be empty,” but it isn’t (193). Instead, he finds his teammates Brady, Nash, Gunner, Asa, and Ryker “lying around on different chairs” and realizes that they’re not only “friends and teammates,” they are a family (193). Therefore, football provides West with a network he can rely on. The sport acts as a distraction from his home troubles and a point of connection with his friends. Furthermore, these football friendships help him through his grief after his dad passes away.
Football also gives Brady a sense of stabilizing community. He’s protective of this social sphere when Maggie Carlton comes to live with his family, because he relies on it to understand himself. In time, Brady welcomes Maggie into the football family, because he realizes that she needs community to heal from her trauma. Indeed, Brady’s and West’s friends become Maggie’s friends, too. Therefore, football ultimately connects all of the characters in the novel. The sport teaches them the importance of forming community outside the traditional family home.
The Higgenses’ House
The Higgenses’ house is symbolic of home. Brady has grown up here and is thus emotionally attached to the house because of his history with it. His relationship with the house remains unchanged throughout the novel. By way of contrast, Maggie has a more dynamic relationship with her aunt, uncle, and cousin’s home. When she first moves in with them, she’s convinced that it isn’t home, that nowhere will be again, and that she doesn’t “want a home” (1). Her emotions are inspired by her disorientation and trauma. She feels uncomfortable in the house because she feels like an outsider and fears that she is intruding on her extended family’s life. She feels particularly guilty for taking over Brady’s old bedroom. She doesn’t want to rob Brady of his space, and she therefore offers to give the room back. Her behavior is a manifestation of her displacement.
However, Maggie’s regard for the Higgenses’ house changes over time. Once she settles in, the house’s symbolic significance evolves. It gradually becomes a symbol of safety for Maggie, rather than one of discomfort. The place ends up offering her community, family, and friendship. She derives a sense of belonging from the house that she never expected to find again in the wake of her mother’s death. Indeed, the house comes to offer her a refuge from her otherwise overwhelming life at Lawton High School. When Maggie is upset or confused, for example, she repeatedly retreats to the house. These scenes illustrate Maggie’s changing relationship with the space. The house gives her a stable, predictable space in which she can pursue healing. By the end of the novel, the house becomes her home, and she decides that she wants to “make real relationships with [her] family,” and to participate in the Higgenses’ home life (264). The place therefore makes her feel safe and gives her the stability she has needed since losing her parents.
Talking
For both Maggie and West, talking is a symbol of closeness. Maggie doesn’t talk to anyone for two years after her father kills her mother. Silence is her form of self-protection. However, she uses her voice again when she meets West and realizes that he needs her support and comfort. West learns to talk to Maggie about his sorrow and pain, too, discovering that conversation is a pathway to connection and healing. Maggie and West’s dialogues throughout the novel illustrate their tight bond.
Maggie also learns to connect with her family and her late mother through talking by the novel’s end. She decides to break her silence with her aunt, uncle, and cousin, because she wants to join and participate in their family life. She talks to her mother when she visits her grave in Chapters 48 and 49, discovering that it makes “it feel as if [her mother] were close to [her] somehow” (319). Therefore, when the characters engage in verbal communication, they are seeking both healing and understanding. Talking about their experiences and feelings helps them relate to and support one another.
