Friendship

Eileen Garvin establishes friendship as the leading theme in The Music of Bees by developing her main characters as introverts who are afraid of confronting people. Each of them possesses character qualities that have caused them to self-isolate, and in this state of loneliness, healing is inaccessible. This point is reinforced by repetition throughout the novel, and by nature of the fact that it connects the protagonists’ lives and enables the audience to understand the deleterious effects of their shared traits of introversion. “Alice Holtzman didn’t like very many people,” and “her body throbbed with the understanding that she was all alone in the world” (282,178). Harry shares her inner experience, and “he knew his mother was right. He needed to make friends. He just didn’t know how” (159). And while Jake is naturally a social creature, his days of making friends are “gone. Those things...