A Story I Loved: "Apollo" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Staff Writer
- Aug 15, 2025
- 4 min read
Another Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie story. I really love her, and her work. “Cell One” was great and pitch-perfect. Apollo does something a little different.
A similarity here between the two stories is that they are focused on a single person, who is not the narrator. Yet the narrator is being utilized to reveal something. In “Cell One”, it was the propulsion of the ending line. Here, the self-discovery falls back on the narrator. The other person is only a conduit through which we see the narrator, clear and reflected, in a pool of water.
Can you call a character a conduit for another? A foil? In real life, you never would call someone that. People do bring out discoveries in other people- but nothing so cool and clinical and disembodied so as to be referred to as plot mechanisms. Maybe in other kinds of fiction, you could get away with it. In literary fiction, it makes me uncomfortable. Everybody is real, in their own way, stirring on the page. People don’t exist to come in and shuffle out. Everyone has their own idiosyncrasies, things that make them tick as a character. Adichie seems interested in discovering precisely what that is for her characters, ruining the beat of a metronome. Her characters fall into entropy and disarray, but finding out why is the most interesting part.
Here’s the story set-up: the narrator reflects on his past, shared with a boy named Raphael, who lived with him and his parents briefly as a servant, cooking and cleaning. He has visited his parents recently in the modern day and learned that their former servant boy has recently been caught going around with a group of bandits, thieving. There’s a cultural nuance here that we’re supposed to live with, too. The story reminds me a bit of “Embassy of Cambodia” where we’re watching a modern-day servitude that we’re supposed to feel a little uncomfortable with. In “Embassy of Cambodia”, the servitude was the point. The story couldn’t exist without it. Here, it’s just another thing we have to live with, another facet of existence that adds nuance to the boys’ interactions.
“Apollo” is the name of an eye infection, also known as acute hemorrhagic conjunctivitis, and it's what Raphael gets. The narrator tends to him by putting eye drops in Raphael's eyes, becoming closer to Raphael in the process. They bond over Bruce Lee and martial arts movies and nunchakus. The narrator feels an intimacy with Raphael, something shared, unbroken, unblemished. But the narrator catches Apollo, since it's an infectious disease, and Raphael does not come to his rescue. The narrator feels betrayed, and catches him talking with another girl at the end of the story. The narrator falls, and Raphael betrays no concern. The narrator tells his parents, in a fit of passion, that Raphael pushed him over, and the story ends with a coldness: we know that all of this is being recounted, and that Raphael is forced to leave, and that later on, he will become a bandit. That the narrator's lie has undoubtedly in some ways sped up this trajectory and accelerated it, if not completely causing it in the first place. But we're left in a hinge at the end, a brief moment of the in-between. The narrator reflects that he could have taken back the lie, "leaving my parents only to wonder".
So much distance, as a child, so much uncertainty, between the real and the perceived. The perceived intimacy of tending to a friend, especially one in a childhood, where those feelings are murkier and unable to be explained. There is no understanding to these things, and yet there is an innocence. Here is a boy, dropping eye drops into another boy's eyes. Feeling jilted when the boy does not return the favor. He resents Raphael for reasons he cannot fathom- for not being tender with him in return, for catching the girl's eye, for wanting her attentions? We as the reader can see these things so clearly, the way that the modern-day narrator can also see them as figments of boyhood desire. It reminds me of Atonement, the book by Ian McEwan, a little, the way that a child sees desire and mis-navigates it, and ruins a life in the process. His small, almost innocent anger becomes something he cannot control. His wanting for control, however petulant, gets the better of him, like a sickness.
Apollo is just such a short fragment of one life. A life can be so long. Yet here is this thing that spring-traps something into motion, awakens a desire. Isn't life like that, though? It's not really long montages, or slow realizations. It can be. But how often is something completely unraveled in a few days, a few weeks? A moment of something clicking? Of finding a knot in your throat you cannot explain watching another boy's eyes, a secret tenderness? We don't learn anything else about the narrator, other than the fact that he remains unmarried and childless for reasons we can probably presume, and that he resents and loves his parents. And yet we know enough about him, because he has shared this most private moment with us, maybe the moment of greatest shame and longing in his entire life, when he was closest to a thing he wanted and did not know what to do with it. The reader can hate him, but that's not the point of the story- after all, he is the one telling it. The intimacy, the closeness, is the point. We cannot shy away. All of us are liars and cheaters and no-gooders. We must endure it with him, then, all of this painful telling. We cannot look away. Adichie focuses on such a moment with laser-focus because a story can be only a few moments, a few tender, terrible moments, and that is enough to encapsulate the rest of a life. We are so crucially defined by so little. We are left, then, like the boy, coming so physically close, to observe all the details of the sickness, which is not really a sickness, only a human life in all its complications, all of its pointless, caged desire going nowhere, which of course at the end of the day is only a sad little story, but is so much more than that, as well.
Resources:
Read "Apollo" here: