3 Books About Male Friendship

What is the nature of male friendship? The following three works explore what both healthy and unhealthy male friendships look like, giving us insight into male psychology and why it’s important for men to have strong relationships with other men. These works demonstrate the depth of connection possible between men and how friends of either sex shape men.

‘The Iliad’ by Homer

At the foundation of Western civilization stands an epic work that deals with war, peace, fate, free will, heroism, and friendship. In an age when waging war was an exclusively male occupation, it’s no surprise that a poem focused on the blistering uproar of combat would have much to say about the bonds between men, particularly the bonds hardened in the furnace of war.

This story of the Trojan War revolves around the magnificent figure of Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors. The warriors have come to Troy to recover the Greek princess Helen. Opposite Achilles stands Hector, the greatest of the Trojan warriors, the “sole defense of his city,” and the poem drives inexorably toward the showdown between these two champions.

However, Achilles stays on the sidelines for much of the story because he feels he’s been insulted by the Greek king Agamemnon. He wants the Greeks to discover, through his absence, just how much they need him in battle. We see in this plot the potentially destructive consequences of male rivalry. Agamemnon and Achilles’s personal feud and their grappling over honor leads to the deaths of many Greek warriors.

What finally brings Achilles back to the fight? Friendship. Achilles’s closest companion throughout the poem is his friend Patroclus, a good-hearted, courageous man who grew up with him. Patroclus is marked by his sympathy: Due to Achilles’s absence from battle, the Greeks are hard-pressed and many of their best fighters are killed or wounded. This moves Patroclus to action. He and Achilles eventually agree that Patroclus will return to the battle wearing Achilles’s armor—hopefully helping to turn the tide of the war. Patroclus achieves some success, but is killed in the process.

Achilles’s grief at the death of his friend can only be described as colossal. In the haunting scenes where he rages, weeps, and wanders the seashore alone, we see just how profound the connection between the two men was. In some sense, Patroclus is Achilles’s “other self”—a point symbolized by the fact that he dies wearing Achilles’s armor. Growing up together, enduring the treacherous journey to Troy, and facing the mortal danger of combat bonded them in a profound way. But it’s more than just the shared experience—after all, Achilles shared these experiences with other men in the Greek camp, but their pleas and struggles didn’t convince him to return to the fight. Only Patroclus’s death—and Achilles’s desire for revenge—does that.

Why two people are drawn to one another in friendship is a mystery. Somehow, they each find an echo of something familiar in the other’s soul. My own theory is that Achilles saw a certain gentleness in Patroclus’s temperament that balanced his own fiery nature. Whatever the case, the poem speaks of their bond as real and genuine love.

Unfortunately, in our day, readers struggle to conceive of love between men that isn’t sexual—and some have tried to claim this kind of relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. However, I see no strong evidence for it. Rather, the poem holds up a type of deep, passionate friendship between men that we have largely lost sight of today.

‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ by Oscar Wilde

“The Picture of Dorian Gray” provides an image of how friends can influence one another for the worse, and how male companionship can go astray. It’s a warning to choose your friends wisely.

Young Dorian Gray is a naive, boyish, handsome Victorian gentleman. He’s formed a friendship with a painter, Basil Hallward, who considers Dorian his muse, finding endless inspiration in his remarkably handsome appearance. Basil has another friend, the charming, worldly, hedonistic, and skeptical Lord Henry Wotton.

Basil halfheartedly tries to prevent Dorian and Lord Henry from meeting, fearing the latter’s corrupting influence on the younger man. But he doesn’t succeed. As feared, the older “man of the world,” Lord Henry, immediately begins to influence the impressionable Dorian. His careless, pleasure-oriented philosophy of life—a thin disguise for a deep world-weariness and despair—infects Dorian. Both Basil and Henry’s praise of Dorian’s charm and good looks go to his head.

Little by little, Lord Henry directs Dorian’s steps into a new path: one of vanity, self-gratification, and cruelty. Lord Henry instills in Dorian a wild, raw desire for new experiences. Life becomes a collection of intricate and interesting delicacies to be tasted and enjoyed. Little by little, Dorian loses his gentleness and innocence, and egoism turns his heart cold.

All of this flows to a large extent from the power of friendship—in this case a power used for ill. Basil tries to bring Dorian back to a more moral path, but there’s little he can do. Basil, too, bears some of the blame for Dorian’s transformation since he wasn’t careful about who he surrounded himself with. The novel reminds us of the powerful influence our friends have over us.

‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy

This novel deals with one of the most beautiful forms of male friendship: the relationship between father and son. Set against the bleakest of backdrops—an apocalyptic wasteland—the story tells of a father and his young son as they journey south to a warmer climate in the years following an unnamed cataclysm that has destroyed most of civilization in the United States.

The darkness of the setting and plot throw into greater relief the beauty of the father and son’s relationship. They have no one but each other to hold onto—and that’s enough. Each one aims simply to help the other, to love the other, and to persevere for the sake of the other. McCarthy puts it this way in a line that encapsulates the whole novel: “They set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.”

A key aspect of the friendship is that each one tries to preserve good in the other. To the father, the son is a blossom of goodness and innocence in a fallen world, whom he will preserve at all costs. The son, by contrast, in spite of his youth, has a strong moral compass. Through his innocent example, he helps keep his father on the right track, reminding him not to succumb to the inhumanity surrounding them. Like all deepest friendships, the two are united in the pursuit of the good, even in the darkest of situations. In spite of its heavy subject matter, the book ultimately offers a message of hope.

These stories of male companionship examine the importance of friendship between men as well as its immense potential to drive action—for both good and ill. Through these novels, we come to understand the male mind and its needs, one of which is camaraderie. Each story shows how men bond through shared experiences and goals and how they can inspire one another to take action—with the potential to become, ultimately, villains or heroes.