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 18.5-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 18.5 Summary: “The Night I Am Made—Dawn”
Paps is in the bathroom, while the narrator sits in the bathtub with his clothes on as the tub fills. Ma is standing, trembling, in the doorway. Paps slowly leads her out, closing the door. Paps tells the narrator that he needs a bath. The narrator tells his father to leave him alone, and that he has rights. Paps notes that he may have rights, but he doesn’t have power.
While they’re talking, Ma is in the narrator’s room, packing his suitcase. His brothers are outside smoking in the truck, warming their hands against the heater.
Paps undresses the narrator, who weakly protests. “Mijo,” Paps says, “You smell” (121). The bath begins. Paps clips the narrator’s toenails: “there is the wet and the cloth and the touch, all of it so brand new and so familiar” (122). He cannot listen to Paps talk because the feeling is overwhelming.
Ma knocks. She has clothes for the narrator. Manny and Joel are cleaning the truck, she tells Paps. The narrator notes how he has been removed from that equation. Now there are only two boys, and he is by himself. He wants to be back in the thick of it. Ma sits and watches Paps bathe the narrator. The narrator thinks that if she could tell the narrator to blame it all on her, she would. They are both silent, and the narrator hears loss and futility in that silence. Paps keeps repeating, “We’re going to get him fixed up” (123). All Ma can do is nod.
Manny and Joel shovel the snow in the driveway. The narrator is grateful that his brothers have this job to keep their minds off of what happened. However, the salting is usually the narrator’s job, and now they will have to do it themselves: “The boy knows that after the shock of this night, his brothers will treat each other formally, with dignity […]” (124). Things will be different from this point on, because the narrator’s actions have broken the way they were tied together before. New ties have to be formed.
Paps, Ma, and the narrator step outside into the cold.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Zookeeping”
The narrator explains that now he sleeps with animals on a leaf bed. He wants to get away from this life of clenched fists and muzzles. He wants to walk upright. Instead, he “sleep[s] with other animals in cages and in dens, down rabbit holes, on tufts of hay” (125). The animals paw at him and keep him down. But he wants to get up and he vows that he will do it.
Chapters 18.5-19 Analysis
Before the narrator is carted off to “the zoo,” Paps and Ma clean him. This notion that being gay is somehow dirty is common. Paps undresses him like a little boy and puts him in the bath. Talking to him tenderly and calling him mijo (son), Paps washes him. The act of clipping the narrator’s nails is one that at once infantilizes and dehumanizes the narrator; the narrator is unable to perform this act himself either (or both) because he is too young or too much of an animal to do so.
The narrator does not want to talk to Ma as Paps bathes him: “she wants to tell him that he can put all his hate on her; she will take it all, if that’s what he needs her to do” (123). More broadly, we see the guilt and shame of being gay manifest in the narrator, as he understands that his sexual orientation has permanently changed the family dynamic. However, while the narrator's sexuality means changes for all family members, it most aptly changes the narrator’s perception of himself; in going to the “zoo,” the narrator devolves from human to animal, his sexual orientation otherizing himself to the point that he no longer can view himself as human. Once he finds a way to leave, he can be “upright” and whole (125).
