My Brilliant Friend Chapter Summaries

Journal 3 Throughout the novel My Brilliant Friend, author Elena Ferrante applies the thematic idea of education to represent the plateau of opportunities that are made possible, if successful in school. When applied to reality, getting a good education is key to finding a well paying job, which would give many characters more opportunities than they have ever dreamed of. In this novel, there are two main categories of educational level; the children that have a possible future outside of the neighborhood, and those that are stuck in a trap -- known as the cage like neighborhood. Because of this, the characters portray different lifestyles, corresponding to one of the types of educational levels.. When the idea of education surfaces, it seems as if reality itself drops off of the

When Elena progresses along through middle school with Lila, she is taken back by the amount of Latin that Lila already knows. Lila even “obliged [her] to translate thirty sentences a day” (110). Lila proves she is a true friend because she still does everything that she can do to help Elena excel and be the best in the class. To add on to Lila helping Elena with Latin, she also assists Elena with the language of Greek. To Elena’s amazement, “[Lila] had began to study Greek even before [Elena] went to high school” (141). Unfortunately, this angered Elena, and she “tried not to see [Lila] for a while” (142). This did turn around in the end, because Elena did accept some help from Lila with this subject in particular. One main milestone that Elena achieves is when she receives an academic scholarship to go to high school. Elena can thank Lila for this, because if she hadn’t helped Elena with Latin and Greek, she could have failed those classes, not gotten a scholarship, and her parents may not have been able to pay the full price for high