Growing Up, Independence, and Friendship Theme Analysis

When Claudia returns from spending the summer at her grandmother’s house and prepares to start eighth grade, she has a clear idea of what the next several years of her life will look like. She believes that she and her best friend, Monday, are going to survive eighth grade, be accepted into the prestigious Banneker High, and be by each other’s sides as they meet every challenge life has to offer. But when Monday goes missing, Claudia finds her vision of the future no longer fits—for the first time in her life, Claudia has to make decisions for herself and navigate school, relationships, family, and puberty without her best friend’s help. As Claudia adjusts to life without Monday, the novel examines both the value and potential dangers of friendship and independence.

In the “One Year Before the Before” chapters, the novel shows that a close friendship can be an extremely valuable source of support and safety. For instance, because of their close friendship, Monday and Claudia are able to effectively navigate a difficult bullying situation at school. Because they have each other to lean on, they usually find that it’s not even worth it to respond to their classmates’ taunts—they’ll never have to try to befriend them, anyway. Further, though Claudia doesn’t realize it until the end of the novel, the girls’ friendship offers Monday an important and necessary escape from the abuse and neglect she suffers at home. At Claudia’s house, Monday is able to see what a healthier relationship between two parents and between parents and children looks like; she’s able to eat full meals and have a clean, warm place to sleep; and perhaps most importantly, she’s temporarily safe from Mrs. Charles’s abuse. Michael, Claudia’s boyfriend in the “After” timeline, even suggests outright that Claudia saved Monday for years, simply by lessening the amount abuse that Monday could have otherwise suffered.

However, the novel also suggests that such a close friendship can cause problems, as Monday and Claudia never learn to exist without the other’s support. The most obvious example of this is Claudia’s dyslexia. Monday and Claudia have suspected for years that Claudia is dyslexic, but because they believe that people will treat Claudia differently if they find out she’s “stupid,” Monday goes to great lengths to help Claudia cover up her learning disability. Monday does Claudia’s writing assignments for her, reads novels and packets aloud to her, and proofreads everything that Claudia writes—meaning that Claudia’s teachers never have the chance identify her dyslexia and get her the help she needs until Monday is gone. To outsiders, Claudia looks like a high achiever when really, Monday is the high achiever.

Claudia doesn’t learn the negative effects of their friendship on Monday until long after Monday is dead. From Monday’s older sister, April, Claudia learns that Monday never felt comfortable expressing who she truly was because she was afraid of alienating or angering Claudia. She never shared, for example, that her favorite color wasn’t actually pink—it was purple, like Claudia, but she thought Claudia would resent it if their favorite colors were the same. She also hid her sexual relationship, believing that Claudia wouldn’t approve. Monday essentially felt like she had to fit a very specific mold in order to be Claudia’s friend, which the novel suggests is one of the many reasons she never told Claudia about the neglect and abuse she suffered at home. She feared Claudia would pity her, something that, according to April, Monday couldn’t tolerate.

Despite the implication that friendships can be suffocating and can cause problems, the novel also shows that the alternative—total independence—comes with its own set of issues. Without Monday to sit by Claudia in classes and help her with her schoolwork, Claudia’s grades suffer, and her classmates’ bullying intensifies. For the first time in years, Claudia dreads going to school, where she’s friendless and fears that people will bully her even more if they discover she has a learning disability. Claudia’s fears turn out to be well-founded—her friendship with Monday shielded her from an extremely hostile school culture, where being at all different or not having anyone to sit with at lunch turns a student into an easy target. And having had only Monday as a friend for years, Claudia also doesn’t know how to go about making new friends. This puts her in an impossible situation where her classmates bully and punish her for not having any friends—but Claudia also doesn’t have the skills to make friends to help alleviate the effects of the bullying.

However, Monday’s Not Coming ultimately suggests that in order for young people to grow up and succeed, it’s necessary that they achieve some degree of independence. While it certainly doesn’t diminish the pain and suffering Claudia goes through when she’s finally diagnosed with dyslexia, even she acknowledges that if it weren’t for Monday’s absence, she never would’ve had the opportunity to learn tricks to help her read more easily. The independence may have been forced on her and may have been traumatizing, but Claudia nevertheless emerges from the experience able to genuinely succeed in school—something she wasn’t doing when Monday was doing all her work for her. Similarly, as Claudia finally remembers that Monday is dead in the “After” timeline and takes concrete steps toward recovering (both from her grief and from repressing her memories), she also comes to a more nuanced understanding of her friendship with Monday. Claudia recognizes that she may have stifled Monday in certain ways—and takes great pains to atone for the damage she may have done, as she does at her dance recital when she dances in a pink costume and imagines Monday dancing alongside her in lavender. This symbolizes how Claudia is learning to think of Monday as a person distinct and separate from her, a discovery that the novel suggests is one of the best ways to honor Monday’s memory. While it’s too late for Claudia to change her behavior in a way that might have allowed Monday to achieve more independence in life, Monday’s Not Coming nevertheless shows that it’s important to achieve a sense of balance between independence and friendship—finding this balance, the novel suggests, is what will allow children to grow into competent, self-sufficient adults.