A Little Life

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015

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Part 3, Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “Vanities”

Part 3, Chapter 3 Summary

JB, whom Willem, Jude, and Malcolm have been increasingly worried about in Part 3, has become addicted to a variety of drugs, encouraged by the influence of an obnoxious friend named Jackson. JB recognizes that Jackson is not a good friend or even likeable, but he has become depressed by the reality that his old friends have grown predictable and boring, settling down into comfortable middle-aged lives. His family stages an intervention, but he does not take them seriously.

After months of JB’s further drug use peppered with occasional failed attempts to quit, Willem, Jude, and Malcolm decide to stage their own intervention. At the end of a July 4th weekend that JB spends in an intoxicated haze, he wakes to find his three friends in his apartment. He lashes out at them, not wanting to hear that he needs help. He does a cruel impression of Jude, one he once saw Jackson doing, “his mouth open as Jackson had done it, making an imbecile’s moan, dragging his right leg behind him as if it were made of stone” (280). Jude, whose worst fear is that people perceive him this way, is deeply wounded that his friend would do such a thing, even while intoxicated. Willem attacks JB, and JB loses consciousness until he wakes in a hospital bed. When he sees Jude sitting by his bedside, he is flooded with guilt at the memory of his impression and desperate for Jude to forgive him.

Part 3, Chapter 3 Analysis

This chapter is unique for being the only one after Part 1 that focuses on someone other than Willem or Jude. JB’s drug addiction serves as an interesting counterpoint to Jude’s addiction to cutting. When JB’s friends and relatives see how serious his drug use has become, they react the way concerned friends and relatives usually do. They start by reaching out gently but then escalate to staging interventions.

In contrast, the same people tolerate and make excuses for Jude’s cutting addiction. The difference is not that they love Jude less, or that Jude’s activity is less harmful. Just as a person addicted to drugs hurts their long-term health and can potentially kill themselves in an overdose, Jude hurts his long-term health and almost kills himself in Part 1 when a cut goes too deep. The difference is that Jude manages to exercise extreme control over the level to which other people can participate in his personal life.

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While Jude feels powerless, his greatest power is his ability to withdraw his affection from those who love him. Because of his childhood tragedy—which almost everyone close to him does not know in detail but has vague ideas about—many people are drawn to him as a person they want to help and support, especially Harold, Willem, and Andy. They sense how great his need is for love and connection, and they desperately want to meet it. This same good-hearted impulse, however, leaves them terrified at the thought that if they push too hard, Jude will withdraw from the relationship altogether. Jude almost never gives voice to this danger by offering ultimatums to people, but they see in the way that he shuts down to questioning that he retreats into isolation when pushed. Because no one is willing to risk losing their relationship with him, no one ever confronts his addiction with the same inflexibility with which they confront JB’s.

The end of Chapter 3, JB’s cruel impression, hangs over the rest of the novel; because of it, Jude consistently clings to the thought of JB as a fundamentally bad person in comparison to his other friends. Again, his reaction exhibits some of the same childlike thinking discussed above in Part 2. The impression would wound anyone’s pride, but Jude is unable to place it in the context of JB being high and misplacing his anger at himself. Instead, Jude internalizes it as the truth that both JB and everyone see when they look at him.