Bud, Not Buddy: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Though he has successfully rid himself of the Amoses and their toxic home, Bud is still in physical pain and paranoid about people noticing him. That he feels like he sticks out in the neighborhood speaks to his broader feeling of not belonging anywhere—his mother is dead, there are no adults who care for him, and even the foster care system failed to keep him safe.

Bud seeks refuge in the library and in a librarian that he thinks may help him. While Bud is usually suspicious of adults, Miss Hill is clearly someone who has earned his trust. He even hatches a plan to sleep in the basement library—which suggests he has spent a lot of time in the building memorizing its layout.

Though Bud’s plans are foiled, he remains optimistic and again shows that he has prepared for this turn of events by having his blanket ready to sleep on.

Just like at the start of the novel when he was anxious about other kids from the Home going through his belongings, Bud is extremely unsettled thinking about the Amoses rifling through his suitcase. That he can tell the Amoses have pawed through his belongings shows Bud’s characteristic attention to detail and reinforces just how precious the suitcase and its contents are to him. He also demonstrates some maturity here with his nuanced description of the Amoses—they may be horrible, but they aren’t thieves.

This passage begins to provide some sense of why the suitcase is so special to Bud—it contains things that once belonged to his mother. Alone outside the library, he appears to derive special comfort from examining his mother’s things and her photograph. While parents are traditionally supposed to protect their children, the orphaned Bud protects his mother—in the form of her photograph—and makes sure she is not “hurt.” This is yet another indication that Bud has had to grow up quickly over the years.

The picture shows Bud’s mother as a little girl in the park, not as Bud reminds her. It’s possible he feels even closer to his mom seeing her at his age, like they are friends or co-conspirators, in addition to being mother and child. He also seems to envy his mother’s life as a child—as it seems like the type of childhood he will never have access to.

Bud’s mother had a tempestuous relationship with her father from a young age, which explains her scowl in the picture. Her father was an especially sore topic for her, which Bud noticed early on. Bud’s answer of “Yes, Momma” may have been his attempt to be a good listener and take her side, though it may also speak to his earlier admission that at the age of six—which is when his mother died—grownups “expect that you understand everything they mean” when “they talk to you.” At the time, Bud likely couldn’t fully grasp the nature of Momma’s relationship with her father, both because of Momma’s vague explanations and Bud’s young age.

Momma badly needed a listener, which again connects to Bud’s earlier frustration that adults often expect young children to “understand everything they mean” when they talk. That Momma chose Bud to confide in also suggests that she didn’t have many other people to turn to. Bud’s memories of his mother’s touch are poignant, and his description of the world slowing down suggests that his mother was the center of his world, and everything else faded away when she was near.

Bud’s alternate description of his mother as a “tornado” suggests that she was full of life and energy—though she may have also been emotionally volatile and unstable. Bud also reveals in this passage that she is the one who told him to guard his name against others’ interpretations. With this revelation, the novel’s title takes on additional weight, as the phrase “Bud, not Buddy” is Bud’s way of feeling close to his mother and upholding what she would have wanted for him and his life. Bud’s mother is also the one who told him about his potential to give love and to be loved by the world even when he feels unseen.

That Bud’s mother doesn’t try to force Bud to understand everything at such a young age suggests that she does realize, to some extent, just how young he is. Bud’s “rule 83” also highlights how much he’s had to grow up—he has the emotional sensitivity and awareness to realize that when an adult says “don’t worry,” it usually means that something worrisome is, in fact, about to happen. This also speaks to Bud’s general distrust of adults and the things they say.

Bud draws on his mother’s wisdom that blessings are always around the corner, a particularly pertinent reminder right now, as Bud is still all alone outside of the library in the middle of the night. Instead of feeling heartened by his mother’s words in the moment, however, Bud thinks about all the other things he wishes she could have told him before her death.

Once again, Bud reveals himself to be a strategic planner who is accustomed to taking care of himself. Instead of having a parent to wake him up in the morning, Bud reminds himself to wake up “real early,” showing how he’s had to become his own parent. In addition, even though he’s only a child, he has the foresight to think about how he’ll find his next meal and the awareness to know exactly where to turn for help. Missions are secular or religious institutions, often staffed by volunteers, that focus on serving the poor and homeless by providing hot meals and other types of support.