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 18.1-18.4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 18.1 Summary: “The Night I Am Made”
“The Night I Am Made” is broken up into one short initial chapter, and four more subchapters that detail the events of one night. The boys have grown up. They are lean with long, ropy muscles and wide foreheads. They observe the night from a loading dock, smoking cigarettes as it snows. They will end up involved in violence, failing out of school. When they get jobs, they’ll make friends with boys who are similar, boys “with punched-out teeth, bad breath, easy winks” (104). Later, they will realize that they are different from these white trash boys who have real history in this countryside, who have fathers who are not Paps.
They are proud to be who they are, though, and they dream of what they will do in the future: “They weren’t scared, or dispossessed, or fragile. They were possible” (105). However, the narrator draws himself as apart from his brothers, as a part of what they can understand, but also outside of what they can conceptualize: “They smelled my difference—my sharp, sad, pansy scent” (105). The brothers resent him because he gets better grades and might accomplish something with his life. They are also proud of him and want to keep him safe. This is the narrator’s last night with his brothers.
Chapter 18.2 Summary: “The Night I Am Made—Midnight”
The brothers are at the docks finishing a bottle of liquor. Manny tosses the bottle into the trees and it doesn’t make a sound. They marvel at the phenomenon of its soundless fall. As they walk, they encounter a stray cat and her kittens underneath a dumpster. They go and buy milk for the kittens, put some into a plastic lid and watch to see if the kittens will drink any. The narrator observes that the kittens are unattractive and desperate. Manny wonders how much time will pass before the kittens start fighting: “How long before they jump the runt?” (107). The narrator knows that his brothers are laughing at the narrator, who is a runt himself. The narrator calls them both creeps and says that they are ignorant and they embarrass him: “Look at my brothers—their saggy clothes, their eyes circled dark like permanent bruises, their hangdog hungry faces” (108). The narrator notes his difference, his abilities with language, how his parents think that he will go further than the other two. The narrator keeps a journal where he writes about his family and insults them, and allows himself to be bitter.
The narrator’s brothers won’t accept his pity. Manny grabs a tree branch and points it at the narrator, and Joel tells him that he is “fucked up.” He wants the narrator to admit it. Joel locks the narrator’s arms behind him. The narrator tells Manny to beat him up with the stick if he wants to. Manny pretends to strike, then gives up. Joel lets him go.
It begins to snow heavily and they smoke under the overhang of a building. The talk turns to how special Ma thinks the narrator is. Manny says that in Ma’s mind, he and Joel are just alike, but the narrator is, as Joel pipes in, “A fucking golden egg” (111). She wants them to protect the narrator like they are still little boys because the narrator will always be their younger brother. The narrator begins to walk away. They ask him where he’s going, and he turns the corner as they yell after him.
Chapter 18.3 Summary: “The Night I Am Made—Late Night”
The narrator walks three miles in the falling snow. His destination is the bus station: “This was what I’d been up to behind their backs, sleazing around the bus station’s men’s room […] This was the scent they’d picked up” (113). He has figured out how to sneak into the restroom. He has explored the place on several occasions, but the only person who engaged with him told him that he was a “cute kid” and that he should leave (113). On this night, there is just one bus in the lot.
The bus driver asks the narrator if he wants to go to New York. The narrator says that he actually just has to pee. The bus driver warns him against going into the restroom at this time of night. He also remarks on the beautiful snow, though it has delayed him an hour and the passengers have been told to go home and come back the next day. The narrator says that he doesn’t want to go to New York; the driver wonders how he had to pee so badly it took him to this bus station. Then he closes the bus door.
Though the narrator’s heart is beating hard and he continues to ask the driver about the bathroom, he wants to stay: “‘You want me to make you,’ the driver [says]. ‘I’ll make you. I’ll make you.’ And I was made” (115).
As the narrator walks back along the road, he thinks of the experience—the cold in the back of the bus, how each touch was cold and unexpected. He yells over the passing cars, “I’m made!” (115).
Chapter 18.4 Summary: “The Night I Am Made—Deep Night”
The narrator’s family is all together in the front room when he comes in the door. The power of their accusatory looks backs him up. He notices his journal on Ma’s lap. He’s written about his most secret fantasies about the men in the bus station bathroom. It is a “violent pornography with [himself] at the center” (116). He kneels and tells his mother that he will kill her. Paps goes for him, and Manny and Joel hold him back. In doing that, they end up hugging him. They are all clumped together. The family is “like a bronze sculpture of sorrow” (117). The narrator realizes that they have all read the journal.
The narrator notes that he could have gotten up and hugged his family, and maybe they would have returned the embrace. This is not what he chooses to do, though. He attempts to claw at their faces, and when he cannot, he scratches at his own. He screams and swears at them, becoming more brazen and unchecked. The narrator explains, “‘I said and did animal, unforgivable things. What else, but to take me to the zoo?” (118). Hours after this incident, they drive the narrator to a psychiatric hospital.
Chapters 18.1-18.4 Analysis
“The Night I Am Made” shows the boys once they’re older. Manny and Joel lead predictable lives: They have blue-collar jobs and don’t dream about moving past their current socioeconomic status. Manny and Joel know that there is something different about their younger brother. He has a different attitude and way of carrying himself. The narrator is also more accomplished in school: “All at once they were disgusted, and jealous, and deeply protective, and deeply proud” of the narrator (105). Amid the strong feelings they have about him, he is moving away from them, and though it is as yet unspoken, they all know it is happening.
In “Midnight,” after drinking, the brothers find some stray cats, which they feed. This shows an increased depth and maturity on the part of the brothers, as their earlier selves might have been cruel to the animals, or at the very least indifferent. The narrator sees parallels between the runt in the litter and himself, though he calls Manny and Joel out on their comparison and labels them as creeps. Joel calls him “fucked up” (108). When Manny threatens the narrator with a stick, the youngest brother will still not admit that anything is upsetting him. The narrator’s brothers still love him, and Ma has asked them to protect him, but these feelings and obligations have also made them resent him. The narrator realizes this, and has begun to diverge from the brother relationship even further. On this night, he literally walks away and into another part of his life.
“Late Night” takes the narrator down the road and away from his brothers, to the bus station bathroom. This is a place he has tried to go to have sex on more than one occasion. He is always tacitly or outwardly rejected for being too young. In rural, blue-collar areas, this type of anonymous sex for young gay men is not uncommon; unable to feel comfortable about coming out to family and friends, young gay men seek sexual affirmation and refuge among older, experienced strangers.
A bus driver correctly perceives why the narrator might be hanging around the bathroom, and the narrator then has his first sexual experience. Even though it’s uncomfortable, as he walks home, the narrator feels jubilant and ecstatic: He is becoming who he wants to be, and who he is. It’s telling that this moment of coming of age happens on a bus, which is itself a sort of liminal space, a place between places.
When the narrator arrives home in “Deep Night,” his whole family is waiting for him, his journal open and his sexual orientation—and his deep-seeded angst toward his family—now on display. He has written about his sexual fantasies, and now Paps, Ma, Manny, and Joel know everything. Thinking at first that only Ma has read it, he threatens her, reacting with animal violence and shameful words. In realizing that he has been otherized by his family members, the narrator effectively does the same to himself. This forces him from the domestic space and into a “zoo,” his term for the mental health facility where he will wind up.
