43 pages • 1 hour read
Nicholas SparksThe Longest Ride
Nicholas SparksFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Ira Levinson
Ira Levinson, at 91, is preparing to die within months from lung cancer when his pickup skids off the road, stranding him trapped and bleeding. Alone and afraid, he conjures the specter of his dead wife to console himself with her company and uses these last few hours to look back on his long life and the love he found with Ruth: “A man should die as he had lived […] surrounded and comforted by those he’s always loved” (237). His memories are of a fairy tale romance disrupted by the couple’s struggles with their childlessness. The touching letters he writes every year on their anniversary, even after Ruth is gone, testify to his unflagging romantic spirit. As Ira weakens in the car, he imagines Ruth bolstering him with the cliché that love is eternal and that his fast-approaching death will reunite him with her.
Ira and Ruth’s art collection functions as the novel’s great MacGuffin—a world class set of paintings worth millions that the couple amassed over the course of their lives. Collecting art connected Ruth to her family’s past as part of the Austrian intellectual elite; but Ira, a relatively uneducated shopkeeper, cares more about Ruth’s appreciation for the art than its cultural status. For him, the artworks are a symbol of love—without children, Ruth and Ira found connection through building the collection. This prompts Ira to add to his will the strange codicil that leaves the collection to anyone who buys a portrait of Ruth made by one of her elementary school students, thus monetarily rewarding anyone who puts more stock into sentimental value than in cultural importance.
Luke Collins
The character of 21-year-old Luke Collins draws on the iconic American cultural figure of the cowboy, with his signature cowboy hat and boots, rugged machismo, stoic courage, and resilient individualism. Luke works hard on the ranch through long days of hard lifting and endless chores. He embodies simplicity, artlessness, and anti-intellectualism: When Sophia asks him the name of his dog, he replies without irony, “Dog” (39) as if to say what else would you call a dog? Though he loves Sophia, he does not understand anything about her world—college, art history, and museums are foreign to him.
Before he meets Sophia, Luke has only ever been ferociously devoted to his parents, and he was devastated by the death of his father, the only hero in his life. To honor his father’s memory, Luke is a fully committed, nationally ranked bull rider, even when it threatens his life. Like Ira, Luke faces his own grim medical condition: After a terrible fall from a vicious bull, he suffered a concussion that threatens to end his bull riding career or even kill him. Each practice and competition is charged with the awareness of his mortality. However, Luke refuses to give up his sport, convinced that he is only risking his life to help his mother save the family ranch. Only when Sophia points out the selfishness of his obstinate competing without caring about what would happen to his mother or to Sophia if he were to die does Luke finally realize that he must give up bull riding. With Luke love is simple arithmetic. Minus Sophia, he is nothing.
Sophia Danko
In her early twenties, Sophia Danko is in search of her purpose, an art history major in a generation that avoids the humanities in search of financial rewards. When the novel opens, Sophia is heartbroken over the cheating and betrayals of her ex-boyfriend Brian. On a whim, she acts on her attraction to Luke, a man so far out of her world that she has to explain to him things like college and sushi. Sophia challenges Luke to step beyond the emotional moat he has so carefully hedged around his own heart. In her dramatic ultimatum to Luke—it’s me or riding—Sophia demands Luke start living for others, and not just for himself.
In the ICU, as Sophia reads Ruth’s letter to the dying Ira, she realizes that this elderly couple lived the same idealized romance that she hopes for with Luke: “With you, my life felt like a fantasy adventure—despite our ordinary circumstances, your love imbued everything we did with secret riches” (361). Sophia decides to trust her heart, give up her dreams of academic and career success, and instead to be with Luke.
Ruth Levinson
Ruth appears in two guises in the novel: as a character in Ira’s past and as a hallucination conjured by the dying Ira in his present. Ira’s memories of Ruth protect him from dying in the car accident, sometimes by generating survivalist ideas like drinking snow and other times by sustaining him emotionally. Ghostly Ruth is a sort of guardian angel, reminding Ira that the value of his life comes from what they shared.
The historical Ruth was first-generation immigrant whose family fled the Nazis for North Carolina, where her heavy Austrian accent, her Jewish faith, her belief in the value of education, and her fierce love of art made her feel like an outsider. She finds belonging in the shy and unprepossessing Ira Levinson, a haberdasher with little interest in art and a man whose sterility means the couple can never have biological children. Ruth doomed quasi-maternal relationship with the abused student Daniel McCallum nearly destroys her. She recovers through her passion for art; in collecting, Ruth finds a way to bond once more with Ira.
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