54 pages • 1 hour read
John GrishamThe Partner
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Money and Corruption
Money and the greed it inspires are the major motives for corruption for the characters in the story. The novel shows how large amounts of money can act as a temptation for almost anyone and explores the boundaries of moral fortitude and weakness. The Partner asks the question of whether money corrupts or whether a person’s internal corruption will make them susceptible.
In order to explore this theme, the novel sets up numerous equivalent moral dilemmas where characters are tempted by the pursuit of money. Benny Aricia was dissatisfied with his position in his company. When he realized that Platt & Rockland was already defrauding the government, the prospect of getting in on the scam tempted him to cross the line himself. He was inspired by Platt & Rockland but conceived his own plot out of pure greed. Benny then tempted Patrick’s law firm. They weren’t particularly dishonest at the outset; they were successful enough to be more than comfortable, but the opportunity for major-scale corruption hadn’t crossed their path yet. Once it did, they easily fell in with the fraud and brought in Senator Nye, who for 10 million was willing to participate. Stephano has no moral limits in order to please his clients and be paid. Trudy and Lance commit crime for profit and plan to murder Patrick for the insurance money. Although Patrick’s initial plan was to get away and live quietly somewhere without a lot of money. He didn’t conceive of the theft until he was cheated by his partners. Then, resentment triggered greed, and because the money was available, he saw a chance and took it. Finally, Eva was an honest lawyer who gradually fell under the spell of money. The novel’s interlinking scenarios around corruption and money posit continual dilemmas for the reader as they assess and judge the relative value of the characters and their decisions.
Not all of the characters are motivated by love of money, and this presents a moral lesson at the heart of the novel. At the start, Eva was genuinely drawn to Patrick before he told her about the $90 million. Sandy and Huskey admire Patrick’s audacity and his escape from the rat race, but, although they fantasize about freedom, they are not tempted by greed. Sandy and Huskey illustrate that each of the characters who fell under the spell of the money had the opportunity to be satisfied without it. Benny resented his lack of corporate advancement, but he was still wealthy. Patrick’s law partners were already successful. Patrick’s original plan was to head south, get a job as a bartender and live on the beach with no money. None of the characters are desperate or destitute and could have found satisfaction in the lives they already had. By grasping for more, the characters lose everything.
Freedom and Connection
Sympathy for Patrick as the anti-hero stems from the novel’s exploitation of the human need for freedom. Like Sandy and Huskey, all people dream sometimes of a life with no burdens or obligations. While the criminal “victims” of Patrick’s plot are angry and resentful toward Patrick, Sandy and Huskey admire and envy him for his escape from the grind and drudgery of everyday life. They laugh over the cunning of his plot and wish him well, as the narrative encourages the reader to. While these characters, and the reader, recognize that Patrick has committed a crime, they want him to get away with it because they dream of a similar escape.
The narrative counters the idea of freedom with the idea of connection, as a tension which humans experience in their daily lives. Patrick is able to plan his escape because he lacks the deeply meaningful and loving relationships that keep him anchored to his responsibilities. The narrative shows that Patrick never had a family to speak of. He wasn’t close to his mother, his wife is unloving, and even “his” child’s biological father is another man. He could leave them without pain. He arranged for the welfare for his wife and her child as part of his escape, knowing that she cared about his income and not him.
Several of the characters are shown finding life’s meaning in their families and this gives context and poignancy to Patrick’s experience and decisions. Sandy and Huskey, for example, joke about joining Patrick in paradise, but they ultimately reject Patrick’s ideal life because they have families that give them meaning and satisfaction. Sandy telephones his wife several times while he is on business for Patrick, and he complains about missing his kids’ school and sports events. Huskey is looking forward to retirement, but he still talks about his children starting college soon. Even Stephano is influenced by his wife’s feelings, the only time in the novel that he takes someone else’s feelings into account. Eva, too, is close to her father and brother, and her father’s abduction negatively affects her feelings for Patrick and rebalances her priorities around the idea of freedom Patrick has built. In addition to family, the novel’s wholesome characters enjoy a sense of connection through meaningful work. Sandy and Huskey have work they care about that ties them to their moral values and supports their families. Huskey is looking forward to the freedom of retirement, but he has earned his leisure by a lifetime of service to the law. Eva, too, had a career and ambitions that were meaningful to her. Patrick, on the other hand, got no sense of worthwhile purpose from his career. He planned to achieve freedom by divesting himself of obligations and working only enough to support himself, until the temptation of the $90 million presented itself.
Freedom and connection shape the narrative through Patrick’s character arc. Patrick does wish for family and his loneliness is part of his motive in absconding. A part of his dream is to marry Eva and surround himself with children, but the money he has stolen makes this an impossibility. His theft limits his ability to make a real connection with anyone. He must live on the run and even Eva only sees him for brief periods at a time. His freedom has become a form of prison. Eva’s final disappearance with the remaining money restores Patrick to the freedom he originally wanted and now he envisions himself teaching English to Brazilians—something that helps other people. He anticipates a life where he can balance freedom with connection and will be free to seek meaningful relationships. He had to lose everything before he could appreciate what freedom really means.
Justice, Mercy, and Revenge
Grisham uses his narrative and characters to explore the nature of justice. In particular, the novel explores the difference between ideas of legal justice and natural justice. What Patrick did to Aricia and his law partners is an example of natural justice. They committed a crime and then became victims of the same crime when Partrick stole from them. They learned how it feels to be stolen from. They also learned how it feels to be betrayed by someone they used to trust—just as they betrayed Patrick. This is a “rough” or natural justice, stemming culturally from the concept of “an eye for an eye.” This form of justice is key to the heist narrative and to Patrick’s role as an anti-hero. He may be acting outside the law, but the narrative presents his actions as representative of justice in an instinctual way. The vicarious pleasure of this partly lies in the fact that it is transgressional against social mores.
The novel shows that the natural justice principle is, however, partly one of revenge rather than true justice. It is also self-serving and corrupting because when Patrick punishes his associates, he becomes rich but culpable. Legal justice would have required that he exposed them to the law and let the legal system mete out punishment. Instead, he matches his partners’ betrayal by betraying them in exactly the same way they did him, and he did it in the way that would most hurt them. The novel suggests that this is Patrick’s key misjudgment and the source of all his trouble in the novel. It is his fatal flaw as a hero—a literary device dating from Classical literature that is the catalyst for conflict and drama in a narrative.
Judge Huskey illustrates the opposite of vengeance: mercy. He understands the frailties that lead people to do things they regret and would never do again if they were acquitted. It pains him to see those people punished for mistakes they regret. He recognizes remorse and self-castigation as sometimes being punishment enough. Thus, Huskey sympathizes with Patrick’s temptations. Huskey often feels that mercy would serve justice as well as or better than punishment. He can see that Patrick was punished for his crime by its own natural consequences, even experiencing vengeance in the form of torture. His punishment has already fit the crime.
Patrick himself escapes legal justice. Everyone in the novel acknowledges that Patrick was wrong to have stolen the money including, significantly, Patrick himself. He stole it from thieves, but it was rightfully the property of the government. Justice would dictate that he be sentenced. Instead, he manipulates the legal system to escape all consequences. The readers and Patrick’s friends are relieved that Patrick escapes; like Judge Huskey, they empathize with Patrick’s motives, recognizing that under the circumstances anyone might all be tempted. The reader also recognizes that Patrick has been punished in the natural justice sense by four years of living in fear, including the trauma of abduction and torture. Once the money is returned with interest, the reader regards the debt to society as paid, although the law would seek to punish Partick if it could. Eva’s abandonment at the end of the story is another form of natural justice and reward for Patrick. When she absconds he is returned to the life he originally envisaged for himself before he was corrupted by greed and revenge. Symbolically, he is cleansed of his crimes through the application of natural justice.
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