Friendship and Belonging Theme Analysis

Making friends isn’t something that comes easily to Percy. Having changed schools every year for the last several years, it’s been difficult for him to make any lasting friends—especially when he appears to be such a troublemaker at school, and therefore a liability to be around anyway. This begins to change at the beginning of the school year when Percy meets Grover, a kind and caring worrywart—who later, Percy discovers, is a satyr (a mythical half-goat, half-human creature) sent to protect him. Later, after Percy learns that he himself is a demigod, he makes himself at home at Camp Half-Blood and then embarks on a quest with Grover and his new friend Annabeth. Finally, Percy feels as though he belongs—all because, for the first time, he’s around kids like him and around friends who will always be there for him. Through this, Percy discovers that friends can fill in where one’s family might fall short, and in doing so, provide a person a sense of belonging they might not be able to find otherwise.

Many of the young demigods at Camp Half-Blood don’t have perfect, functional families to provide support and encouragement. By virtue of having one divine parent (who, in almost all cases, is absent from the child’s life), many of the demigods were raised by either a single parent or a parent who remarried, oftentimes to someone who was less than thrilled about the monsters that continually hunt half-bloods and thus endanger the entire family. Because of this, most demigods arrive at Camp Half-Blood feeling alone in the world; Percy is no exception to this. However, Percy soon discovers that Camp Half-Blood was designed to fill in the gaps left by these absent or disinterested family members by giving demigods an opportunity, often for the first time, to make friends with others like them. Though there are definitely divisions and rivalries among different cabins at camp (demigods with the same divine parent are put into the same cabin, and rivalries between the gods replicate among their children), all the campers nevertheless share many similarities that bring them together. They’re all in grave danger when they leave camp, and they all understand that camp is likely the only place where they can feel safe, respected, and a part of a community. On a grand scale, then, Camp Half-Blood seeks to fill in the gaps left by the demigods’ fractured families by offering them friendship and camaraderie with other kids like them. The friendships and the mentoring relationships that arise out of this setup are some of the most meaningful and positive in the novel—and in Percy’s case in particular, his friendships with Annabeth and Grover make his quest to recover Zeus’s thunderbolt possible.

The friendships between Annabeth, Grover, and Percy, though ultimately strong, don’t begin through conventional means. Though Grover poses as a normal sixth grader at Yancy, he’s actually a satyr on a mission to protect Percy from monsters. However, just because it’s Grover’s job to protect Percy doesn’t mean that the boys’ friendship isn’t real. Annabeth, on the other hand, is friendly toward Percy until she realizes that his father is Poseidon. At this point, she begins to taunt him, since Poseidon and Annabeth’s mother, Athena, have a rivalry—this, in Annabeth’s opinion, means that she can’t be friends with Percy. As the three set out on their quest, however, they all do their best to put these unconventional beginnings behind them and treat each other like genuine friends. They’re able to do this primarily because despite the factors that might make them think they shouldn’t be genuine friends, the affection they have for each other is real. And because of this affection and the desire to see each other succeed, both individually and in terms of the quest, all three behave in ways that will help the others succeed.

Percy, for instance, makes a point to do everything he can to help Grover succeed in his job of protecting him. Grover is on his second protection mission; his last one ended in failure and he must pass this one in order to reach his goal of obtaining his Searcher’s license so he can go look for the god Pan, who disappeared several millennia ago. Percy knows how much this means to Grover, and so he does everything in his power to help Grover be brave and complete his mission. Then, since Percy hasn’t spent much time at Camp Half-Blood and so doesn’t believe as fully in replicating their parents’ rivalries, he also does everything he can to convince Annabeth that they should indeed work together and treat each other with respect. Ultimately, Annabeth comes to agree with Percy: even if their parents are rivals, she and Percy should still be able to work together toward a common goal, both for the sake of the goal and because they genuinely enjoy each other’s company.

Though Percy, Annabeth, and Grover all part ways at the end of the novel so that Percy and Annabeth can return to school and Grover can begin searching for Pan with his new license, it’s exactly because of the strength of the kids’ friendship that they feel safe and comfortable separating. Percy only chooses to go home when he learns that Annabeth decided to patch things up with her dad and head home for the school year, and a full school year at Camp Half-Blood without Annabeth and Grover is understandably unappealing to Percy. However, their separation offers one of the novel’s greatest lessons: that though friends might separate for a time, they can do so knowing that they can return to their friendship another time and receive the same kind of care, compassion, and sense of belonging as they did before.