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.
Themes
Fringe Society and the Effects of Othering
One of the ways Torres highlights the othering of characters in the narrative is through zoomorphism and animalistic behavior. The broad definition of zoomorphism includes art than envisions human beings as animals; in We The Animals, Torres does this often, though in ways often more figurative or metaphorical than literal. Behaviorally, both the boys and their parents consistently arrive as devolved or otherwise harboring characteristics more commonly ascribed to animals than people. The boys often thinks of themselves as a pack. They are described by the Old Man as both locusts and animals. Paps and Ma don’t care about being sensual/sexual with one another in front of their children—a trait more common to non-human animals than people. The boys, at one point, identify themselves as a hybrid of trolls and goats, and they are often foraging for food, and are often shockingly violent. Manny and Joel, at one point, say that they can smell the narrator’s “pansy scent” (105).
The othering of the narrator is most fully rendered in the novel’s climax and subsequent denouement. After his family finds his journal and discovers that the narrator is gay, the narrator figuratively morphs into an animal, clawing and scratching and explaining that he “said and did animal, unforgivable things” (118). His family now treats him as an animal, bathing him and shipping him off to what the narrator calls a “zoo.” Once at the mental health facility, which the narrator calls the “zoo,” this zoomorphic transmutation is complete; the narrator is now among other animals and has become entirely animal himself.
In We the Animals, zoomorphism functions as a stand-in for otherizing. The family is made other by their socioeconomic status (they are outside of mainstream society due to their heritage as Puerto Rican and American, and their class status), and the narrator is made other (and otherizes himself) due to his sexual orientation.
Racial Identity
When Paps shows the boys how to dance, he first defines everything that they are not: They are not rich or poor, nor are they fully white or fully Puerto Rican. Paps calls them “mutts.” They do not have the life experiences that he had, growing up in Spanish Harlem and hanging out in parks and dance halls. The brothers have not experienced the grittiness of the projects. Neither do they have any idea about Ma’s youth as a white girl in Brooklyn. They have to carve their own identity into this small, predominately-white upstate New York town by sticking together. They don’t hang out with the white-trash kids because they do not look like them and they do not share their interests in music or their slang. If there were other Puerto Rican kids to become friends with, the brothers likely would not fit in either because they would not be considered legitimate.
Interestingly, this notion of racial identity seems to be more prominent earlier on in the novel. By the novel’s end, Manny, Joel, and the narrator have discovered identities that at least partially seem to supersede race. For Manny and Joel, their identity revolves around their class; both have blue-collar jobs and seem to find worth and identity in this. The narrator, while closeted until he is outed, seems to place more of his identity in his sexual orientation than his heritage.
Escape and Escapism
Attempts at escape and dreaming of escape occur consistently in We the Animals. Each family member, at various points, longs for a life past the one they know. Paps leaves for a considerable period, and Ma, after she is raped by Paps, attempts to leave, getting as a far as a park before ultimately returning to the family home with the boys. More common than these actual escape attempts, though, is fantasizing about escape, and the novel employs many symbols of escapist fantasy.
In “Ducks,” we see Ma take the kids and leave her abusive domestic environment. At the park, she dreams of a new life in Spain; it’s clear to the reader that this isn’t going to occur, however, and Torres uses an array of imagery in this moment to show Ma and the boys as being caught between two places: a new life without Paps and a return to the home. The park itself is a liminal space; it is public and accessible to all—just as the notion of escape is—but few dwell in a park for more than a few hours. The overturned canoes also function as a symbol of disallowed escape; while they could actually take the family to somewhere new, the boys, instead, sleep in them. Further, when the passing motorist offers the boys a viable means of escape, Manny threatens to kill her. While the family members often want to leave, they find themselves ultimately unable to do so.
The family members, then, are left with dreams of escape, of fantasizing about leaving while remaining trapped in their collective situation. This is perhaps best exemplified by the trench that Paps digs in the backyard. Each family member spends time in the dug hole, and each one returns to the reality of their shared domestic life afterward. Manny, at one point, says to the narrator that all they need to do in order to escape is “fix gravity,” so that they can sink upward to Heaven—an impossible action.
The only genuine departure by any family member is that of the narrator leaving at the end of the novel—an escape that is mandated by the other family members and tragically ironic, in that the narrator is placed in a mental health facility for lashing out at his family after his sexual orientation comes to light. Consistently, it seems that escapist thought proves safer and ultimately somehow more fulfilling than actual flight for the characters in the novel.
