49 pages • 1-hour read
The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife: A Novel
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Chapters 1-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of death, illness, pregnancy loss, sexual content, sexual harassment, addiction, and child death.
Eighty-two-year-old Fred has just been evicted for failing to pay his rent. He wanders a park where some nursing home residents have been brought for an outing. Fred finds that one of them has died, alone in his wheelchair. As Fred wheels the chair toward the others, he trips, and the body falls out of the chair and rolls down the bank and into the river.
Suddenly, one of the caregivers spots Fred. Assuming that Fred is actually the deceased man (named Bernard), the caregiver rushes him into the wheelchair, which is then loaded into a van.
Chapter 2 Summary
In the past, two young sisters—Sadie and Hannah—play tag until Sadie’s nose begins bleeding. They find their mother inside, home from work for lunch, and she asks the girls’ father to take Sadie to see a doctor for her frequent nose bleeds.
Chapter 3 Summary
At the nursing home, a caregiver named Denise is angry about Bernard’s fall. She searches his file to document it and becomes increasingly angry upon discovering that other personnel have misfiled things. She thinks about her daughter’s health problems and worries about what could be wrong.
Chapter 4 Summary
Fred wakes in Bernard’s room and realizes that Bernard urinated in the wheelchair he is now sitting in. He tries signaling for help, but when no one answers, he gets into the shower by himself. Denise then enters, chastising Fred and introducing him to Kevin, a new nurse. Fred repeatedly tells both Kevin and the aide, Linh, who brings him lunch that he is not Bernard. However, Fred soon realizes it will be difficult to convince anyone of the truth: Bernard had dementia, and a photo of Bernard reveals how much Fred looks like him.
Chapter 5 Summary
Fred awakens early the next morning and decides to simply leave the facility. As he attempts to sneak out, however, he is accosted and then propositioned by a resident named Patricia. She pulls Fred into her room, and Fred must press an emergency button that sounds an alarm in order to escape her.
Chapter 6 Summary
Fred is able to sneak out of the facility when a couple enters. He sets off toward his apartment, but as it is no longer his, he is unsure where he will spend the night. He plans to retrieve his birth certificate to prove that he is not Bernard. However, when a police car approaches, “Bernard” agrees to go with them after they promise to buy him a coffee.
Chapter 7 Summary
Linh brings Fred to a large room for happy hour. There, a man calls out to him, using Fred’s real name. The man, named Albert, has dementia and believes Fred is actually his late brother, also named Fred. Fred plays along as they enjoy their drinks, realizing he is enjoying the company.
Chapter 8 Summary
In another room the next day, a movie plays, but Fred studies the other residents instead. Kevin, the new nurse, tends to each of them and then offers Fred some ibuprofen for his arthritis. He asks Fred to tell him about his late wife, and Fred happily complies.
Chapter 9 Summary
The narrative switches to Hannah’s point of view in the past again. A doctor explains that Sadie has leukemia and that she will lose her hair due to chemotherapy. Wanting to be helpful, Hannah cuts off the hair of her Barbie dolls to make a wig for Sadie. Her father returns as she finishes and is annoyed by the mess.
Chapter 10 Summary
At work, Denise worries about her husband Greg’s temper and wishes she had not had to leave the girls with him while she works. Fred interrupts her thoughts by inquiring how she is. This confuses her, as dementia has always prevented Bernard from remembering Denise’s name.
Chapter 11 Summary
Fred hears Albert lamenting from his wheelchair and realizes Albert’s glasses are missing. While retrieving them from Albert’s room, Fred studies his family photos, recalling his wife’s pregnancy loss when he was 25. He wishes they had been able to have children.
When Fred hands Albert his glasses, Albert once again believes Fred to be his late brother.
Chapter 12 Summary
As a Fred Astaire video plays, Fred chats with Linh. She talks of Hanoi, where she is from, and Fred, having visited, speaks of his love of Vietnamese food. When she sneaks him some pho the next day, Fred feigns low blood pressure and calls for Kevin—a ploy to get Kevin (who has a crush on Linh) together with her.
Chapter 13 Summary
Back in the past, Hannah wakes and remembers that she and Sadie spent the night at a neighbor’s because their mother had to work a night shift. Their father is often gone, and Hannah does not like the quiet house. Their mother picks them up. Back at home, Hannah overhears her speaking to someone on the phone about an overdue bill.
Chapter 14 Summary
Fred attends an exercise class where he meets Albert’s wife, Valerie. Though not a resident, Valerie visits Albert daily. The three have tea afterward at a café inside the nursing home; Valerie and Fred discuss Albert mistaking Fred for his brother. Valerie explains that the brother died just before they married; he was to have been the best man. Albert, she goes on, has never mistaken anyone for Fred before.
Returning to his room, Fred reads a newspaper headline: Bernard’s body has been found.
Chapter 15 Summary
The article reveals that a body, which it identifies as Frederick Fife, was found. Fred recalls that his wallet was in the pocket of the coat that he laid across Bernard’s lap and that thus fell into the river with Bernard. Fred feels relief that he will not be blamed for Bernard’s death; he also no longer has to worry about his dire financial situation. He decides he will live as Bernard permanently.
Chapters 1-15 Analysis
The tone of the novel in its opening pages is humorous: Fred makes jokes about his aging prostate in a way that suggests the story will be a light-hearted one. Even his discovery of a deceased elderly man is presented not as tragic or alarming but as a slight inconvenience. Stories of mistaken identity often contain comedic elements, capitalizing on the situation’s ironies (including the dramatic irony of the reader being in on the secret), and this one is no exception.
Nevertheless, there is a dark undertone to much of the early action. Fred’s revelation about his impending eviction adds seriousness to his situation and tacitly draws attention to the high rates of poverty among older adults. That no one takes notice of Bernard in the park—let alone recognizes that he has passed away—illustrates another facet of ageism: just how easily the elderly are overlooked. Fred himself has experienced this sense of invisibility and instantly wants to help Bernard. The resulting mix-up between Fred and Bernard, though humorous in its outrageousness, nevertheless underscores that the elderly are, in the eyes of society, interchangeable.
This backdrop of societal ageism also frames Fred’s response to the mix-up. Initially, Fred is determined to prove his identity and set the situation right; that he does make some initial effort to correct the error softens his characterization and allows him to rationalize his accidental identity theft, in keeping with the theme of The Ethics of Deception. When he finally escapes, however, he is reminded of the reality of his situation: As a man who has outlived many of his friends and relatives and who has just been evicted, he has no home to go to and no one to whom he can turn. The warm and friendly atmosphere of the nursing home is both inviting and safe—so much so that when police discover Fred, he does not protest but quickly allows them to return him to the nursing home. The idea that a nursing home can be an inviting place speaks partly to the desperation of Fred’s circumstances, but it also furthers the novel’s exploration of Obtaining Meaning in Later Life. The novel critiques the idea that those who are elderly have nothing left to offer society, suggesting that it is possible to lead a full and productive life at an advanced age.
The novel provides subtle hints that Fred’s past is fraught with unresolved trauma. He repeatedly berates himself for failing to “come home sooner” in regard to an episode involving his wife (6). That his marriage to his late wife, Dawn, was rich and meaningful despite this is clear from the way he recalls her and the frequency with which he does. It strikes him, for example, that his life at the nursing home might be “a gift from his Dawn” (78)—a remark that suggests he sees the world through the lens of his relationship with his wife even after her death, which has become another source of trauma. The guilt and grief that Fred feels shape his character and serve as evidence of his genuine love for others and his desire to help and protect them.
The Importance of Familial Bonds is also evident as Fred gets to know Albert and Valerie. Though Albert mistakes Fred for his late brother, Fred comes to feel as though Albert truly values him for himself, and this connection is something that Fred has sorely missed. As he establishes new friendships, the thought of leaving the nursing home thus becomes more and more unwelcome. To counter the guilt he feels over his deception, Fred searches for ways to help those around him, strengthening the bonds he has developed and further illustrating that old age does not preclude positive engagement with society.
The opening section also introduces the narratives of Hannah, a young girl, and Denise, a caretaker at the nursing home who is implied to be Hannah’s mother. Hannah, like Fred, is alone and floundering, in her case due to tensions at home surrounding the illness of her older sister. Hannah is wracked by sadness, sensing that her sister’s illness is terminal, but she also is desperate for her parents’ attention. Not unlike Fred, she feels invisible, having been denied the love and connection that she needs to be whole. Like Fred, she tries to be helpful, putting the needs of others before her own, as evidenced by her attempts to make a wig for Sadie. Though the novel will ultimately reveal that Denise is not Hannah’s mother, viewing a parallel situation from the perspective of a parent recontextualizes Hannah’s frustration by showing all that children are not privy to: Denise is deeply anxious about her daughter’s prognosis, and her stress is compounded by having to work a demanding job to support the family and pay the daughter’s medical bills. She has difficulty setting aside the stress of her personal life to effectively carry out the duties of her job, foreshadowing her later addiction, and her home life is similarly unbalanced.
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