A Little Life

Several years have passed since the end of Part 1; Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm are now in their early thirties. Although Jude and Willem could now afford to live elsewhere, they still live in their Lispenard Street apartment. Willem is closer to achieving his acting dream, with a starring role in a high-profile play. Jude works at the US Attorney’s Office and tutors a young boy named Felix on the side for extra money. Though he admits it to no one, he saves the extra money for a surgery he hopes to get to erase the substantial scarring on his back.

Jude recalls his early months as a freshman at college, where he felt like an alien because he did not understand all the cultural references his peers made. At this point, the narrator does not reveal why Jude’s childhood was so different than his peers’ childhoods; the reader knows that Jude grew up in a monastery, but not why or where. Though his close friends respected his obvious disinclination to discuss his past, JB pushed him the most, at one point giving him the nickname “The Postman,” claiming that Jude’s mysterious past rendered him “post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past” (940).

When Willem, JB, and Malcolm first began to notice Jude’s leg pain in college, Jude recalls, they asked him the cause, and he explained it as the result of a “car injury,” not offering any elaboration. Though he said “injury,” all of them except Willem assumed he meant car accident and explained his condition to others this way when asked.

Jude’s reminiscences then go back even further to the day that he met a kind social worker named Ana who was assigned to him as he lay in the hospital after the “car injury” that damaged his legs. The narrator still does not reveal the circumstances of this injury, but Ana’s remarks about a man named Dr. Traylor indicate that he is responsible. Ana was the first loving and non-abusive caregiver Jude had in his 15 years of life. She oversaw his placement in a decent foster home, ensured that he did not have to appear in court to testify against Dr. Traylor, encouraged him to apply to college, helped him complete the applications, and even paid the application fees. She died only 14 months after meeting him but was a faithful friend in those months. She tried to warn him that he needed to open up to her about his trauma because if he did not talk about it soon he would never be able to. He refused but would come to regret it for the rest of his life as Ana’s words proved prophetic.

The narration then shifts to another flashback of a more recent period of Jude’s life: his years pursuing a master’s degree in pure mathematics at MIT, while Willem, JB, and Malcolm attended different graduate schools. During these years, Jude developed a close relationship with Harold Stein, a law professor who saw Jude’s aptitude for legal reasoning. Jude became Harold’s research assistant, and Harold soon started inviting Jude into his personal life; he introduced Jude to his wife, Julia, had him over for dinner frequently, and even purchased a professional wardrobe for him before Jude began a clerkship with a well-respected judge. Jude expected the friendship to wither when he moved to Washington, DC, for the clerkship, but to his astonishment Harold and Julia stayed in touch. By the time he moved back to New York City, Harold and Julia felt like surrogate parents to him, although he did not tell even them personal details about his past, afraid that they would be disgusted and withdraw their love.

Back in the present, the narrator explains Jude’s relationship to Andy, his doctor. Although Andy is an orthopedic surgeon, he acts as Jude’s primary physician for all of his health needs because the two were friends in college and Andy knows how private Jude is. Andy is the only person who has seen Jude naked and knows the extent of his scarring—both the scars on his back from childhood beatings and on his arms from his own cutting. Andy is also the only person Jude has entrusted with a scant outline of his childhood because the details are pertinent to his medical history.

Here, the narrator reveals that the incident Andy suspected to be a suicide attempt was not a suicide attempt but was an instance of cutting accidentally taken too far. Andy tortures himself over whether he should have Jude committed to a psychiatric ward after this incident but decides against it on Jude’s pleading. Feeling responsible to do something, he institutes a new system according to which he sees Jude every week and notes any new scars he has from cutting. Andy hopes this routine will shame Jude into stopping the habit but is frustrated to find it does not. He continuously acts as a reality check for Jude: He presses Jude to start therapy, discourages him from continued false hope that the spinal problems at the root of his leg pain will one day improve, and insists that he should not pursue the surgery for his back scars because it has not been proven safe and effective.

The close of the chapter offers the first flashback to Jude’s days at the monastery. The monks in charge of his upbringing tell him that he was abandoned next to a dumpster behind a drugstore as a baby. They refuse to answer most direct questions he asks about himself and say that state officials were unable to find anyone other than them for him to live with. Although some of the brothers are kind to him, most are not. Jude endures cruel insults, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. Because he is not allowed to own anything, he develops a penchant for stealing. When he steals a lighter one day, the monk who discovers the theft punishes him by burning his hand.

Eventually, Jude begins throwing loud, violent tantrums as a way of expressing his profound unhappiness. He is always punished harshly, but he comes to want this, believing himself deserving of it. One day, he lobs the heads off of a patch of daffodils grown by one of the monks, Brother Luke. Expecting harsh punishment, Jude is shocked to discover a jar of the daffodil heads waiting in his room that evening. The chapter concludes with Brother Luke extending mercy to Jude, asking him to visit his greenhouse even though he knows Jude is responsible for damaging the daffodils. Despite the seemingly kind act, Jude identifies this event as the moment where his life began a downward spiral.