Bunny

“The Bunny invitation is still ticking in my pocket like a little bomb.”

Samantha uses a simile to link the Bunnies to violence. With a connecting word (“like”), she compares the invite to a bomb. The simile foreshadows the Bunnies’ violence and their union of violence and cuteness—the bomb is “little.”

“I feared they might be naked, reclined on whimsical furniture out of Alice in Wonderland. Or else in pastel lingerie, using Anaïs Nin erotica as fans. Massaging each other to the music of Stereolab. Obscure yet erudite porn projected on some massive screen.”

The cultural products highlight the hybridity of the Bunnies. They connect to the cuteness of Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories (and the 1951 Disney movie adaptation). They link to the sexual writings of Anaïs Nin, the indie band Stereolab, and they merge pornography with sophistication. The sequence of images reinforces the many parts that compose the Bunnies.

“I’ve heard ‘the Body’ mentioned since being at Warren. Because at Warren, the Body is all the rage. As though everyone in the academic world has just now discovered that they are vesseled in precarious, fastly decaying houses of bone and flesh and my god, what material.”

Samantha mocks the Body and the ludicrous concepts that can come out of academic spaces. Conversely, the Body becomes a serious issue for Samantha and the Bunnies. They engage the Body—they make other bodies—and harm those bodies and their own.

“I want to ask them, Did you really ask me to hunt a bunny? Did a bunny leap into my lap? I want to tell them, You know, rabbits are following me now. We should do it again sometime, Creepy Doll says shyly, like they’re asking me on a second date.”

The italics reveal the number of voices that Samantha hears in her mind. In this quote, she replays dialogue or a conversation with Creepy Doll. The diction—the word “date”—hints at the erotic relationship between them. Later, the Bunnies will fall dangerously in love with Max—Samantha’s Draft/text.

“I want to say, What the fuck? Where the hell have you been? Why did you disappear on me? But she’s looking at me so normally that all I can say is, ‘Hey. How have you been?’”

Samantha hears her own voice in her head, but she doesn’t follow this voice and express it out loud. She doesn’t confront Ava about avoiding her after the Smut Salon. Empowerment and agency are a big part of Samantha’s growth process.

“Unlike your new friends, I’m a grown woman.”

Juxtaposition highlights a key difference between Ava and the Bunnies: She’s an adult woman. The implication is that the Bunnies are childish, and their mean-girl clique suggests they are a bit sophomoric.

“Your beauty is nuanced and labyrinthine like a sentence by Proust.”

The Draft Beowulf drops this line on Samantha, and the simile satirizes the stereotypical lothario. He compares Samantha’s looks to sentences by the famously long-winded French author Marcel Proust. The comedic hyperbole (exaggeration) indicates that Beowulf is not a perfect Draft; he could use another version.

“‘You want to be empowered.’ ‘You want creative agency.’ ‘You want agency, period. Control.’ ‘Over your art.’ ‘Over your life, Bunny.’”

The Bunnies sound like motivational speakers. Using stock feminist rhetoric, they try to compel Samantha to join their clique. Ava mocks the jargon of certain kinds of feminism. The irony, the twist, is that the Bunnies will disempower Samantha and take away her agency.

“We think of it as art meets life, Bunny. We’re putting art into the world. It’s like a living interactive installation. You know? But I mean, if you’d rather kill them, you go right ahead, Bunny.”

The repetition of Bunny—the first and last sentence ends with the proper noun—reinforces their totalitarian traits. At this point, all five members are Bunny. The quote juxtaposes art with life to show how the Bunnies collapse the difference between the two with their Drafts. It’s in italics because, in Chapter 15, the Bunnies appear to have almost total control of Samantha’s mind.

“‘Fuck hands,’ says our crudest, truthiest Bunny. ‘I want the cock.’”

Although all the Bunnies become Bunny in Chapter 15, it’s possible to sometimes tell them apart. Vignette says this bit of dialogue because she’s the blunt Bunny. The diction contains cuteness and crassness. There’s the explicit cuss word, and the words “crudest” and “truthiest” produce “e” sounds, like twee.

“For a second, we lock eyes. Then she walks away. Out of the parking lot. I’m leaving.”

The imagery highlights how looking and/or looking away symbolizes connection and a break-up. Samantha and Ava look at one another, then Ava breaks eye contact and walks away. Ava’s voice remains in Samantha’s head, alluding to the theme of Constant Voices.

“What I see instead makes the hairs stand up on my skin. A stag. Standing just a few feet away from me in her snowy front yard. Staring right at me, through me, with eyes like liquid smoke.”

The image of the male deer foreshadows what will happen with Samantha and her opportunity to lead a workshop and make a Draft out of a bunny. The deer and Samantha lock eyes; in keeping with the symbolism behind eye contact, they already have a bond.

“We’re all educated adults here”

The statement comes from one of the Bunnies and exemplifies Mona Awad’s sharp, ironic humor. The declaration flips expectations. For most of the story, the Bunnies act infantile. People like Ava also call them childish. Yet the Bunnies, living in their own reality, think of themselves as grownups. Technically, based on their age, they are.

“‘I’D PREFER NOT TO SHARE MINE.’ My shout bounces off the walls of the Cave. Echoing and echoing.”

Samantha finds empowerment and agency by refusing to share what “home” means to her. The all-caps spotlights Awad’s playful text, and the diction—the words “I’d prefer not”—allude to Bartleby, the abject scribe in Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). When Bartleby’s boss assigns him a task, he tells his employer “I would prefer not to.”

“It’s what I can afford, I tell her. Because even if she’s not here, I might as well talk to her all the same.”

At Cheapo’s, Samantha maintains a dialogue with Ava. She’s aware that Ava is only in her imagination, so she has a grasp on the difference between reality and fantasy, yet she speaks with her anyway. Samantha needs company, so she imagines Ava is with her.

“Sometimes they get violent, I guess. I don’t know. Whatevs, girl. Should we go to Trader Joe’s and get more cookie butter? I need it, like, for my soul.”

Creepy Doll tells Samantha this. As the Bunnies have made countless Drafts and those Drafts live in town, perhaps they’re responsible for the town’s bizarre ultraviolence. Creedy Doll jumps from violence to Trader Joe’s, and the flippant leap produces humor, as does the connection between Trader Joe’s cookie butter and the soul. It’s as if the former is a spiritual entity or the latter is a tasty treat.

“I shake my head. It feels so light now without the braids, I could shake it forever. She unbraided it the day after I arrived like she was dismantling a bomb.”

The image of Ava unbraiding Samantha’s hair represents a purge: Ava tries to help cleanse Samantha of the Bunnies. The simile compares the undoing of the braids to a bomb, echoing the simile for the invite to the Smut Salon. The Bunnies remain quite violent.

“The truth is I saw nothing. The tall watery form of a stranger with a black cloud for hair. A woman blurred around the edges. The Dead.”

The image shows how Samantha sees herself. Better put, it reveals how she can’t see herself. When she looks in the mirror at the store, she can’t discern what she looks like. Her shaky self-image makes her vulnerable to the Bunnies and reliant on Ava.

“I die inside when he says this. Recall the words, which I wrote down in another, older notebook. Scrawled it ecstatically on the lonely campus green when I was hungover after one of our first day- and nightlong escapades.”

Max says what Samantha wrote in her notebook. He reinforces the claim that the Drafts symbolize writing; he’s a product of Samantha’s words.

“It’s part of a performance piece I’m working on. A collaboration. I thought I’d involve the Body more viscerally.”

Caroline/Cupcake uses irony to discuss why she cut the words “eat me” into her skin. It’s ironic because it’s a twisted, unexpected engagement with the Body—her body. The quote showcases Awad’s dark humor, as self-harm becomes an artwork that a student can workshop.

“I guess what I’m saying is that I understand now. I should have trusted myself as a reader. My instincts as a reader are so, so valuable. And I’m grateful to Victoria for illuminating that for me. For teaching me about who I am as a reader. Thank you so much for that, Victoria.”

Kira/Creepy Doll’s snarky tone demonstrates the unraveling of the Bunnies. They’re a dedicated, loyal clique no more. Using positive, cheery diction—words like “grateful” and “thank you”—Kira lays into Vignette/Victoria’s pretentious writing.

“The real world, lady. It’s out there. Do you even know that? You’re going to have to get back to it sometime.”

The janitor isn’t a part of the creative writing program, so he speaks with an everyday, unpretentious diction. He represents reality and tries to give Samantha a reality check. The appearance of the janitor arguably fetishizes working-class people, as if people with non-artistic jobs don’t have active imaginations or automatically have access to life’s deeper truths. On the other hand, as an outsider, he grounds Samantha in the present after her surreal encounter in the Cave.

“Samantha, we’re not going to pretend we know the details of whatever squatter drama you had with your little fake threesome in that abandoned house on the west side.”

Despite the toxic workshop, the Bunnies keep their sassy tone, as they make fun of Samantha with cutting, catchy phrases like “squatter drama” and “little fake threesome.” The Bunnies continue to sound like mean girls. To be an effective mean girl, a keen way with words comes in handy. This sentence also adds some clarity and resolution. The reader might have wondered how Ava afforded a house, more so after the reveal that Samantha made her from a swan. It makes sense that her house was abandoned.