The Narrator Takes In Apollo

The Narrator Takes In Apollo marks a turn from an immediate, practical refusal toward care for a dog whose circumstances are bound up with Deceased Friend’s absence. Asked by Deceased Friend’s third wife to give Apollo a home, the Narrator first says that she cannot: dogs are prohibited by her lease. The later account finds Apollo living with her, but does not show the arrangement being made. Its emotional force lies in the pressure between those two moments: a rule that seems to settle the question, and the knowledge that refusing may leave a vulnerable animal waiting in a kennel.

The Request and the Refusal

The request comes from Deceased Friend’s third wife, who tells the Narrator that she wanted to speak about the dog and asks whether the Narrator will take him. The Narrator is caught off guard. Her first response combines relief and annoyance, feelings that register the request as both unexpected and burdensome rather than as an uncomplicated offer. She says she cannot take Apollo because her apartment building does not allow dogs.

The lease is not a vague excuse. When the woman explains that Deceased Friend had said the Narrator might take Apollo, the Narrator answers that she has never met the dog and repeats that she cannot keep him under the terms of her lease. She distinguishes her affection for animals from experience or capacity: she loves animals, but has had cats, considers herself a cat person, and has never had a dog. The refusal is thus presented as a concrete limit, reinforced in a second exchange, not as a lack of compassion.

The Narrator initially searches for another solution. She observes that plenty of people might want a beautiful purebred dog, imagining that Apollo’s appearance and breed could make him easier to place. But the answer does not address what the woman is worried about: not simply finding any owner, but finding a home that would meet this particular dog’s needs. Her shoulders sag, and her trembling voice conveys the strain of having to make the decision. The exchange leaves the Narrator facing the distress behind the request, even while she still maintains that the lease prevents her from helping.

The Dog’s Circumstances

Deceased Friend’s third wife makes a case for Apollo in the practical details of his care. He is a guard dog who needs exercise, but, she says, less than many other breeds; even off leash, he stays close. He is obedient, knows his commands, does not bark when he should not, does not destroy things, has no accidents, and knows to stay off the bed. These assurances answer the anticipated difficulties of bringing a dog into a home, one by one. They also make Apollo legible not as an abstract burden but as an older, trained animal with habits that might allow him to live alongside the Narrator.

His age and health make the possibility of a new home more urgent. Apollo had a checkup only a few months earlier and is in good health apart from arthritis, which the woman describes as common in large dogs his age. He has had all his shots. The account does not present him as a dog whose care would be effortless: arthritis is a real condition, and exercise remains necessary. But the details counter any implication that his age makes him an unreasonable or hopeless responsibility.

The kennel is the decisive circumstance. The woman wants to get Apollo out of it, and fears that if she brings him home herself, he will spend the rest of his life waiting by the door. Her concern is not merely where the dog will be housed; it is the emotional cost of a home in which he remains oriented toward someone who is gone. The Narrator thinks that love deserves better than this, and the prospect breaks her heart. In that moment, the lease still exists, but it no longer resolves the moral and emotional question raised by Apollo’s confinement.

From Refusal to Shared Home

The transition is not staged as a clear acceptance. The conversation ends with the Narrator’s sympathy and the conviction that Apollo should not be left waiting, while the next section begins with him already in her home. There is no account here of a lease exception, a negotiation with the building, or the practical terms of the transfer. The later scene is nevertheless decisive evidence of the outcome: Apollo is present with the Narrator, and the story has moved from the question of whether she can take him to the realities of living together.

That new arrangement does not instantly produce intimacy. Apollo mostly ignores the Narrator and behaves as though he might as well live there alone. He sometimes meets her eyes, but looks away almost at once. His large hazel eyes seem strikingly human to her and recall Deceased Friend. This early distance matters: taking him in does not make him an immediate substitute for the person who is missing, nor does it mean that the dog’s grief or reserve disappears as soon as he has a home.

The Narrator understands the attachment through an earlier experience with her cat. When she once left the cat with a boyfriend while she was out of town, the boyfriend—though not a cat lover—later said that having the cat was like having a part of her there. The memory gives the Narrator a way to describe what Apollo’s presence means: having Deceased Friend’s dog is like having a part of Deceased Friend nearby. It does not erase the loss or claim that the animal is the person. Instead, it names a connection carried through the ordinary fact of sharing a home with a beloved animal.

The Meaning of Taking Apollo In

The action brings the novel’s private grief into a practical decision. The Narrator cannot explain death, and the woman’s fear that Apollo will wait by the door gives that limit a domestic form: absence becomes a dog expecting someone to return. Taking Apollo in cannot answer why Deceased Friend is gone, but it changes what happens to the dog left behind. The choice is meaningful precisely because it is not a solution to bereavement; it is an act of care made within bereavement’s unresolved conditions.

Apollo’s presence also complicates the Narrator’s role as a caretaker. His obedience, cleanliness, and restraint are offered as reasons he can live with her, but the later scene refuses a simple reward in which gratitude quickly turns into affection. He looks away. The Narrator has to share space with an animal whose responses remain his own, even as she reads his eyes through her memory of Deceased Friend. The bond begins in accommodation and recognition, not in an easy claim to know what Apollo feels.

The decision therefore holds together two kinds of attention: attention to the dog’s concrete needs and attention to what his existence signifies for the grieving Narrator. The lease establishes the obstacle; the kennel and the image of Apollo waiting establish the cost of doing nothing; his later presence establishes that the refusal did not stand. By taking him in, the Narrator gives Apollo a home while accepting that his company will evoke, rather than resolve, the absence from which the request arose.