A Little Life

Willem’s reaction to his burgeoning acting career underlines why he is so compatible with Jude. Despite gaining the kind of fame that often makes people self-centered, Willem remains humble, believing that actors do not deserve the extreme special treatment they are given. This personality aligns perfectly with Jude’s own humble outlook. While Jude’s humility goes too far, into self-hatred, he and Willem share an essential gentleness rooted in lack of ego.

Although the end of Willem’s relationship with Philippa may not seem like a major moment in the book—the reader barely gets to know Philippa at all—it does provide the occasion for one of the novel’s major themes to emerge: the validity of friendship as a life-defining relationship. Willem refuses to see romantic love as more important than the love he has for his friends, especially Jude. As the book proceeds, readers can see that deep friendships can even be forms of romance themselves, even if those romances do not involve a sexual component. A Little Life’s main characters share the belief that adults with spouses and children are not more adult than other people and that a life built around friendship is every bit as meaningful as a life built around a husband, wife, or child.

In Chapter 2, Jude’s concern about his future serves as a valuable reminder of the hurdles that people with disabilities must consider in a society constructed without plentiful accommodations for them. Jude’s career choices are dictated by his need to ensure that he will have enough financial stability to afford a possibly expensive future as he grows more and more immobile. Harold’s inability to realize that these calculations must figure into Jude’s planning involves the limitations of Harold’s perspective as an able-bodied person, but it also involves Jude’s own silence on the issue. Because Jude does not want to think of himself as a person with a disability, he frequently downplays his pain rather than asking for help.

Even as Chapter 2 demonstrates the different calculations that come into play for people with disabilities who must navigate a world largely constructed for people without disabilities, it also demonstrates how wildly easier these struggles are for the wealthy. Because Jude travels exclusively in wealthy social circles as an adult, solutions present themselves to him that the average person would have no ability to access. One of his best friends, Richard, just happens to have inherited an entire building filled with luxurious lofts, and his friendship with Jude means he is willing to sell for less than market price. Most people do not have friends with spacious New York City lofts to spare and could not afford to buy them even if they did, reduced price or no. Though Jude’s young life was marked by deprivation, his adult life is marked with abundance.