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Adolescence: Chapter 21
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Brilliant Friend, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Female Friendship
Masculine vs. Feminine Violence
Women’s Work
Poverty, Social Climbing, and Sacrifice
The Uses of Community
Love, Sex, and Strategy
Summary
Analysis
On New Year’s Eve, Lila and Lenù, along with their families, arrive at the Carracci home. Lenù has a bit of a crush on Stefano, who is seven years older than her and Lila. She wants an older boyfriend like Stefano, Pasquale, or Enzo. Lenù hopes to attract the attention of an older boy, but all night, all of the young men are focused only on the fireworks and their “war of men.”
Lenù believes that having an older boyfriend (rather than her current boyfriend, Gino) will allow her to feel more mature and powerful. She continues to imagine how she can use male attention to improve her own life, confidence, and circumstances.
Themes
At midnight, Lenù can hear the whizz of neighboring fireworks displays. Up on the roof, she helps the children present light their sparklers while the boys haul up crate after crate of fireworks. Watching them prepare, Lenù feels her neighborhood is on the verge of a “civil war.” As the fireworks display starts in earnest, the Solaras, too, continue shooting off bursts of explosives. The neighboring terraces light up again and again, back and forth, as the warring groups of boys become more careless with their rockets and accidentally—or intentionally—begin launching them at one another’s roof decks.
The fireworks displays, usually so joyous, quickly turn violent this year as the Solaras realize that a group of other families, led by Rino, are attempting to outdo them (and thus symbolically unseat their power in the neighborhood). It seems as if everyone’s collectives hopes for an end to the cycle of violence and power-grabbing are dashed.
Themes
Lenù looks over at Lila, who is “absorbed by the spectacle” of the fireworks. Later on in life, Lila will describe watching the boundaries of Rino’s outline break apart—for the first time, she’ll tell Elena years later, she was able to see “what he was truly made of.” At last, the Solaras’ display is done. Rino and the others cheer, believing they’ve won—but then loud pops and flashes from the Solaras’ terrace makes them believe that the display is starting up again. Only Enzo recognizes the sounds for what they are: gunshots. He rushes everyone inside as Rino, undeterred, leans over the edge of the rooftop and shouts insults at the Solaras.
In the moment, Lenù doesn’t understand what Lila is going through. By providing context from years in the future, however, Elena uses this moment to describe a major shift in Lila’s understanding of the world. Lila, so full of hope for her and her family’s ability to pull themselves up out of poverty and change their fates, points to this horrific moment as one in which she became more aware than ever of the inescapable, crushing nature of male violence.
Themes
