52 pages • 1 hour read
Justin TorresWe The Animals
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary: “Wasn’t No One To Stop This”
Manny, Joel, and the narrator play a kind of foursquare in the street, except they cannot let the ball touch the ground. When they pass the ball, they each use one of Paps’s expressions: “And this is for raising your voice […] And this is for doing nothing...” (86). It gets dark and the other kids playing near them on the street go home for dinner. Manny tells them about black and white magic. Lately, he has been taking the brothers into the forest to look for poisonous mushrooms, which are supposed to contain “God’s black magic” (87).
They decide to see who can throw the ball with enough force to break a window on a camper that has been sitting in a neighbor’s driveway. When a light comes on at the house, they wait. Manny says that they can’t be seen and suggests they use a rock instead. He throws the rock, the glass shatters, and they run.
When they turn back, they see that the neighbor’s son is following them. He carries a flashlight and shines it on them as they reach a dead end in the road. With nowhere to go, they sit on a log. The son sits next to them. The narrator describes him as a headbanger, or a kid who likes metal and rock music. He is a few years older than Manny, with a mullet. He is always yanking on his crotch and always trying to lie as much as he can. The narrator says, “mostly we kept separate, us three half-breeds in our world, and the white-trash boys in theirs” (90). Instead of chastising them or wanting to fight for breaking the camper window, the headbanger says he has something that he wants to show to the boys because he hasn’t had anybody to show it to.
The headbanger takes them to his house. His father is in the living room watching TV. The headbanger takes them to the kitchen and gives them plastic cups of soda. As they’re drinking, the mulleted boy’s father turns the TV off. When he gets up, the headbanger pauses and waits: “We knew that squint; what stunned us was the way the headbanger was moving his lips—wild, without voice” (92). With these silent contortions of his mouth the headbanger simultaneously prays to and curses his father. However, the father doesn’t even pay them any mind, heading upstairs.
The headbanger tells them to follow him down to the basement. They don’t question him. The room has exposed ceilings and a dirt floor. There is an old TV and VCR in the middle of the space. The boy pulls a VHS tape from out of his waistband. He pushes it into the player and cues it up.
The image flickers, then focuses. A white teenage boy is on a bed, reading. An older man knocks and comes into the room. The teen calls the man Dad, asks him what he wants. The dad figure is irritated because the son has not done the dishes. The boy says he wants to be left alone. The father reprimands him. The boys sit on a rug that covers the dirt floor, mesmerized by the tape: “This man, this teenager, they were alive, or had been once—in this sparse room, just a bed, sheets, a book, one continuous shot, no angles, no cutting away, like a home movie” (96).
Paps isn’t interested in pornography, if he was, he has told his sons, they would have found it by now. The boys have seen naked photos of women, but only photos. In the video, the older man tells the teen to pull down his pants and bend over his lap. The older man tells the younger one that he likes it. As he watches, the narrator thinks about the bodies of his family members. They have all not only seen each other naked, but bleeding, proud, broke, and vulnerable. None of it is like the video. The narrator thinks about his brothers, and why they won’t look into his eyes.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Niagara”
Paps gets a paid gig in which he is to drive a package up to Niagara Falls. Manny and Joel are failing in school and not allowed to skip, so it’s the narrator who gets to miss a day to come along. They drive for four hours with not much said between the two of them. They stay in a motel, and the next day Paps takes the narrator to see the big attraction. Paps picks the narrator up and lifts him up over the edge, and when the narrator doesn’t “kick or scream,” Paps “lean[s] [the narrator] out farther and he put[s] his lips to [his] ear and he [says], ‘Do you know what would happen if I let you go’” (98). Paps points out that the narrator would die if he let go. The narrator imagines that each crease of water below them is a life, and all of these lives are going over the cliff. He wants to be among them.
After their sightseeing, Paps takes the narrator to a museum and hands him $5, saying he’ll be back in an hour. The narrator asks Paps what happens when a person dies. Paps answers that “[n]othing happens forever” (99), and leaves the narrator at the museum. The museum is full of wax replicas of people born with rare physical conditions, like two pupils in each eye. The narrator finds a room where a three-minute film is playing over and over. The movie features men in barrels going over the side of Niagara Falls. The narrator notes that many of these men died; he remains in the room for hours. A museum worker passes by twice and then comes in to the theatre. The employee asks him why he’s watching the film so many times. The narrator shrugs. The man asks him where his parents are. The narrator says his father will be back to pick him up soon. The man says he’d like to meet the narrator’s father when he arrives.
When the man leaves, the narrator stands where the employee had been and lets the projection wash across his body. He moves closer and dances. He pretends to be a merman prince who has to catch the men in the barrels and make sure they don’t fall to their deaths. However, they always slip through his cupped hands. When they cannot be saved, he invents a dance that will ensure that they go to heaven: “I was consumed in the death dance; spinning on my toes and looking down at my body, the water slipping and rushing over me, I slithered my arms and wiggled my hips against the current” (100). When the narrator looks up, he realizes that Paps is in the doorway watching him, and that he has been there for a long time.
After they stop for hot dogs, they begin the journey home in the dark. Paps tells the narrator that the narrator will need to help keep him awake. The boy has to shake his father’s arm a few times. Paps doesn’t speak for the whole drive back, until they turn onto the road that leads to their home. He begins talking like they have been in conversation for the whole car ride. Paps refers to earlier in the day when he saw the narrator dancing:
‘I was thinking how pretty you were,’ he said. ‘Now, isn’t that an odd thing for a father to think about his son? But that’s what it was. I was standing there, watching you dance and twirl and move like that, and I was thinking to myself, Goddamn, I got me a pretty one’ (102).
Paps thinks there was a unique element in the narrator’s dancing, and cannot shake the image of his beautiful movements. The narrator is silent.
Chapters 16-17 Analysis
These chapters show how the narrator begins to diverge from Manny and Joel. At the beginning of “Wasn’t No One To Stop This,” the narrator defines the brothers as a group—half-breeds versus the white trash headbanger. When they get to his house, and they see the way the headbanger interacts with his father, a little reverent and a bit terrified, they begin to recognize a certain camaraderie with him. Down in the basement, when he shows them the gay porn video, the narrator recognizes that this is something different from any naked images any of them have ever seen. As boys, they have seen nude images of women, and they have also seen all of their family members in the most vulnerable states possible, but this is pure sex. He notes that it “Wasn’t us. Didn’t have anything to do with us” (97). The video shows an interaction that is beyond their understanding, and yet his brothers won’t look at him. In this manner, readers come to understand that the narrator’s older brothers have understood the narrator’s sexual orientation before the narrator has.
This as-yet-undefined feeling or difference of the narrator’s becomes more pronounced in “Niagara.” He is getting better grades than his brothers, so he gets to go on this day trip with Paps. When they see the falls, the narrator imagines what it would be like to drown in them; here, Torres once more overlays the morbid with the beautiful. Paps takes the narrator to a museum of curiosities and leaves him there for hours while he is off on some mysterious task. While Paps is gone, the narrator finds a Niagara Falls documentary playing on loop in the museum and begins to dance in the reflection of the falling water; this is another instance of one of the family members employing escapism to process trauma and understand identity.
After dancing for some time, the narrator realizes that Paps is watching him. On the way home, Paps comments on how beautiful the narrator looked while dancing. There is something in the natural smoothness of the narrator’s dancing that makes Paps unable to look away, but also seems entirely foreign to anything he has ever thought about the narrator. While things will soon take a tragic turn, this is a moment of calm and of familial bonding. While it seems unclear whether Paps, in this moment, discerns his son’s sexual orientation, his ability to view his son’s true essence arrives as important and meaningful to Paps.
