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Urban vs. Rural
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Dry, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
In Jane Harper’s The Dry, the actions of one teenage friend group continue to have an effect on a rural Australian community 20 years later. While Falk, Luke, Gretchen, and Ellie are inseparable in their youth, their friendship dissolves soon after the death of Ellie, when Falk leaves town and has limited contact with Luke and none with Gretchen. On the one hand, the novel depicts how friendships change and perhaps get more difficult to maintain with age, as Falk and Luke struggle to keep up anything more than a surface-level relationship, even up until 20 years later on the day Luke himself dies. As some of the later flashbacks show, Falk’s friend group always had cracks in it, even from the beginning. When he was 16, Falk didn’t realize that Luke had a crush on Ellie or that Ellie drank so much because she was being abused, suggesting that perhaps Falk’s childhood innocence was an important factor in being able to keep up his friendships, which he naively believed would last forever.
Still, despite having a broken friend group at its center, the novel also explores the benefits of friendship. In the novel’s present, long after losing touch with his friends, Falk strikes up new friendships in Kiewarra, including ones with Sergeant Raco and the local bartender McMurdo. These new relationships, which are largely based on sharing similar values and ideas about justice, help Falk survive in the otherwise hostile Kiewarra. Similarly, Falk also starts a new romantic relationship with Gretchen, illustrating how even seemingly broken or dormant relationships can suddenly rekindle. While Harper’s The Dry depicts the difficulties and limitations of friendship, in the end, it argues that friendship is beneficial and perhaps even necessary to surviving in a harsh environment like Kiewarra.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Friendship ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Friendship appears in each chapter of The Dry. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Friendship Quotes in The Dry
Below you will find the important quotes in The Dry related to the theme of Friendship.
Chapter 2
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“It’s good to see you again, Aaron.” Her blue eyes wandered over his face as though trying to memorize it and she smiled a little sadly. “Maybe see you in another twenty years.”
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Chapter 3
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“It died,” Luke said. His mouth was a tight line. He didn’t meet Aaron’s gaze.
“How?”
“I don’t know. It just did.”
Aaron asked a few more times but never got a different answer. The rabbit lay on its side, perfect but unmoving, its eyes black and vacant.
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Chapter 5
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Raco sighed, and flipped open Luke’s aged pack of cigarettes. He put one between his lips and offered the pack to Falk, who surprised himself by taking one. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smoked. It might easily have been in this very same spot with his late best friend next to him.
Chapter 6
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He’d always assumed Luke had been found in the ute’s driver’s seat, but the images showed his body flat on its back in the cargo tray. The lip of the tray was open and Luke’s legs dangled over as though he’d been sitting on the edge. A shotgun by his side pointed towards the mess where his head would have been. His face was completely missing.
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Chapter 8
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When Aaron Falk was eleven, he’d seen Mal Deacon turn his own flock into a staggering, bleeding mess using shearing clippers and a brutal hand. Aaron had felt an ache swell in his chest as he, Luke and Ellie had watched one sheep after another brawled to the ground of the Deacons’ shed with a sharp twist and sliced too close to the skin. […]
Ellie had barely raised her head when the noises from the barn had floated over to where the three of them had been sitting on the sagging porch.
Chapter 14
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She made a face. “I’m working.” For the past year she’d had a part-time job which mainly involved standing disinterestedly behind the counter of the milk bar.
“Didn’t you work last night?”
“Milk bar opens every day, Aaron.”
“I know, but—” It was more work than usual. Out of nowhere he wondered if she was lying to him, then felt ridiculous. She wouldn’t bother.
Chapter 22
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“But seems it’d be better all round if you and I stuck to shooting rabbits together, don’t you reckon?”
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Chapter 29
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‘You know what I mean, Aaron,’ she said. ‘You were there. You saw exactly the same things I did. How weird she was in those last few weeks. When she actually spent any time with us, that is. She was hardly around. She was always working at that crappy job, or—well, I don’t know what. Not hanging around with us anyway. And she’d completely stopped drinking, do you remember? She said it was to lose weight, but with the benefit of hindsight that sounds like bullshit.”
Chapter 32
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The tiny pink face, dark hair and chubby wrist peeked out from the folds of a blue blanket in his arms. Luke held the child comfortably, closely. Paternally.
Chapter 35
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“It was never about Luke.”
Chapter 42
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If my dad finds out, he will kill me.
The sun was gone and night had fallen around him, he realized. Above the gum trees, the stars were bright. He wasn’t worried. He knew the way. As he walked back to Kiewarra, a cool breeze blew.
