“Dogs make people human:” Toward a tender interspecies understanding in Sigrid Nunez's The Friend (2018)

Abstract

The critical and popular appeal of Sigrid Nunez's The Friend (2018), which centers on the bond between an unnamed female writer and a Great Dane, Apollo, suggests that readers are drawn to thoughtful explorations of human–animal encounters in literature. This article examines Nunez's work in relation to ongoing debates on the ethics of animal representation. It argues that the work's assemblage sensibility—marked by resistance to narrative and ontological fixities—helps to reframe the human–animal dyad into a mutually accommodating space of understanding in which each entity's experience is tended to and respected. At the same time, Nunez's nuanced negotiations with anthropomorphism—at once critiqued and acknowledged as inescapable—invite us to consider how tender interspecies companionship could reorient us toward affective and institutional structures of care.