The Little Friend

“Even the cruelest and most random disasters […] were constantly rehearsed among them […] until finally, by group effort, they arrived together at a single song; a song which was then memorized, and sung by the entire company again and again, which slowly eroded memory and came to take the place of truth […] But Robin […] [m]ore than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew.”

This quote explains the family’s revisionist tendencies, which they believe they’ve evaded by not applying them to the subject of Robin’s death. In reality, avoiding the topic is in itself a type of revision, and also creates the space for Charlotte to impose her own false narrative where she is to blame. This prevents her from processing the trauma, gaining closure, or moving forward, thus demonstrating The Dangers of Revisionist History.

“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.