60 pages • 2 hours read
Mona AwadBunny
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Bunnies
The Bunnies take over the story immediately and compel Samantha to provide numerous examples of their voice. From the start, the Bunnies are in Samantha’s head and field of vision. They captivate her; although her tone is derisive, Samantha can’t stop thinking about them, nor can she look away. She marvels at their “pink-and-white bodies, forming a hot little circle of such rib-crushing love and understanding it took my breath away” (7). The Bunnies are an exclusive, forceful group. They remind Samantha of the “beautiful, murderous children in horror films” (8). The comparison holds more truth than Samantha realizes at the time. The Bunnies are murderous and violent—they explode rabbits and behead Drafts. Separate from the Drafts, they break down the boundaries between writing and the material world by embodying their cutesy, violent, sexual, and pretentious writing.
Limits don’t apply to the Bunnies. They usurp their individual identities by calling one another Bunny, and they take away Samantha’s identity; in Chapter 15, Samantha and the four Bunnies turn into an inseparable “we.” The Bunnies tyrannize Samantha, and she can’t free herself from their clutches. After Ava saves her, Samantha returns to their house to lead a workshop. Once Ava and Samantha reunite and “Warren becomes a faraway country” (226), Samantha goes back to school for the emergency workshop with the Bunnies.
The Bunnies are a mean-girl clique and represent power and oppression. The Bunnies infect Samantha’s life and shape her world at Warren. Their power is near-total. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt discusses how totalitarian rulers create their own realities. The Bunnies make their own world, and Samantha has to endure and overcome their extensive despotism.
Cultural Products and Figures
The text features myriad references to books, movies, songs, and artists—in other words, cultural products and figures. The figures and products symbolize identity. Mona Awad uses them to represent the personalities of the characters and characterize them.
Ava has “David Bowie eyes” (9). People often see Bowie as a transgressive performer, and that’s how Samantha sees Ava. She’s a rebel and an outsider with a unique style and an unwavering contempt for authority—the cultish, tyrannical power symbolized by the Bunnies.
The Bunnies each have specific cultural references that symbolize their nuanced and collective traits. Cupcake wears a “Christopher Robin cardigan” (33), referencing A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House At Pooh Corner (1928). Christopher Robin symbolizes Cupcake’s and the Bunnies’ twee, childish aesthetic. He also symbolizes their power; the Bunnies control the Drafts, and Christopher Robin can control the animals in the Hundred Acre Wood. Creepy Doll has “Shirley Temple curls of blood-red hair” (34). The child actress reinforces Creepy Doll’s and the Bunnies’ performative, juvenile cuteness. Disney princesses and the Modernist author Samuel Beckett symbolize Vignette’s personality, as she and the Bunnies mix tropes about girls with the absurd and the jarring. The primary cultural symbol for the Duchess is a “C-list moon goddess” (36). Like a C-list celebrity, the Duchess and the Bunnies can appear tawdry and contrived.
Cultural products and figures also symbolize the Drafts’ identities (or hoped-for identities). They name the Drafts after poets and mythological characters. There’s Rimbaud VI, named after the turbulent 19th-century French poet. There’s also Beowulf—presumably, this Draft should have the personality of the heroic, mythological warrior. Movie stars also illustrate the Bunnies’ desires for their young men. They want them to be like the defiant James Dean, the intense Marlon Brando, or the rom-com heartthrob John Cusack.
Max’s myriad nicknames represent the role he fills for each love interest. He is called “Hud” after Paul Newman’s character in Hud (1963), an antihero who is cruel to those around him; Byron after the scandalous Romantic poet; Tristan after the mythological love interest in the medieval tragedy Tristan and Isolde; and Icarus, a character from Greek mythology who flies too close to the sun with wings made of wax and crashes to his death. At Ava’s house, he listens to an Echo & the Bunnymen song, representing his dark and alternative appeal. The particular song, “Bring on the Dancing Horses,” alludes to the Bunnies’ and Samantha’s work and foreshadows the book’s climax: “First I’m gonna make it, and then I’m gonna break it til it falls apart” (Echo and the Bunnymen. Songs to Learn and Sing. Korova/Sire, 1985).
The Drafts
The Drafts symbolize the writing process. The Bunnies create the drafts like they make their prose. They go to Warren to workshop their writing, and they go to Creepy Doll’s house to workshop and produce the Drafts. In both workshops, they critique the works and provide feedback and criticism. In the writing workshop, the Bunnies call Samantha’s work “abrasive” (29, 61). Later, the Draft version of Rob Valencia calls Samantha “abrasive” (94). Thus, the symbolism is explicit; the Drafts, like the writing, reflect the thoughts and feelings of their creators. Deep down, Samantha hates the Bunnies, and the Draft she creates, Max, hates them too. So does Ava, though Ava, a woman, isn’t technically a Draft.
The Bunnies use literary diction to describe the Drafts—like “intertextual,” “experimental,” and “hybrid” (108)—to reinforce their textual symbolism. Analyzing the Drafts as symbols of writing brings in Roland Barthes. The Bunnies mention the 20th-century French critic and his erotics a couple of times. In The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Barthes links reading a text to desire. For a person to continue reading a book, they have to desire it. The Bunnies desire Max, and Max, as a Draft, is a symbol for Samantha’s writing. Thus, the Bunnies desire Samantha. In the emergency workshop, Fosco says the Bunnies’ stories are “androcentric” (260). As she’s clueless about the other workshop, her critique is inaccurate: The Bunnies’ stories center around their desire for Samantha’s writing.
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By Mona Awad
