Why it Hurts to Read Yanagihara’s “A Little Life”
Jude lived a life of extremes. Before college, he was an absolute object — manipulated both physically and psychologically by men. Jude grew up without agency and independence, stunting the development of his masculinity and forcing him into a limited existence as a sexual being.
During and after college, Jude becomes an absolute subject. He gets everything he wants: freedom, a meteoric career, parents, and friends. When Jude suffers, everyone drops to his side. His friends act like planets orbiting the Sun, obsessively (and ineffectually) trying to help him and asking him about his past.
Yanagihara does a lot to dispel any notions that Jude’s new life in New York is a utopia. There is zero explanation for why Jude’s college friends are so close. Jude’s doctor Andy is inexplicably complicit in his self-harm and suicide attempt. Harold and his wife “save” Jude by adopting him but only worsen his trauma through implicit expectations about love. What is left of the novel aren’t traditional relationships between actual people, but broad Modernist ideals of friendship, family, and art.
“A Little Life” is unusual because it flips and then exaggerates the dichotomous process of growing up. In the West, we cling to the almost religious notion of childhood as a safe haven for children to explore and learn as much as possible until they graduate from school. The idea being that children and youth must be intellectually and emotionally prepared to weather the cruelties of adult society. In the face of adversity, we can use the lessons of childhood and our parents to make sense of the complexity, the absurd.
Jude doesn’t have this. He grows up on abuse, neglect, and false love. Adults, with the exception of a nurse, consistently take advantage of him. Brother Luke excises him from the womb-like monastery, casting Jude into the darkest parts of human cruelty.
This explains the cutting. Jude’s body is literally composed of these traumas, psychologically in terms of his PTSD and physically in terms of his disability and STIs. These traumas prevent him from engaging meaningfully with the seemingly perfect world around him, although he wants to be closer to Willem and he wants to be a good son for Harold. Cutting is therefore Jude’s way of excising the trauma from his body. Unfortunately, the act only cements the scars of his past, creating even more barriers to intimacy.
I disagree with interpretations that “A Little Life” is primarily about friendship, being gay, or abuse. For me, the novel is about memory. I say this partially because Yanagihara spends pages in disparate parts of the story discussing the nature of Jude’s memories, how they manifest psychologically, and their immense power on Jude’s life.
The conflict for Jude is that in order to live, he must either completely forget the past and remain alienated and lonely, or he must fully engage the two extremes of his existence.
This was a choice that Jude couldn’t make, but in the open age of technology it is a choice that more and more people have to make in real life.
I think that Yanagihara is trying to say that the language provided by traditional cultural relationships, such as marriage and friendship, have failed to prepare us for this reversal of growing up, the destruction of childhood.
This is why Jude is “postman.” He is a Christ-figure, a signal fire of our increasingly liquid society. Traumas stain our bodies before we’re even born. Our conceptions of masculinity and femininity are changing. We are unable to find meaning, even with the best of support systems.
I don’t think “A Little Life” is a book of despair. It’s a beginning of a conversation, about how we all carry bits of traumatic memory that change us, that make us hurt each other. To engage with memory is to tell the story of our lives.
