“I say, I slur, I vow”: We the Animals II

This week, our class concluded its discussion of Justin Torres’s We the Animals. As I’ve said before, my students continually impress me with their approach to the text: they are curious and ballsy in their investigation, never shying away from difficult questions or subjects. Thursday was no different. Students were interested in talking about the narrator’s experience in the basement with his brothers watching what seems to be a home-made pornography; defining this moment as another event in which he seems himself as separated from his “pack.” In effect, the narrator desires to feel kinship, acceptance, and perhaps a form of mutual understanding with his brothers, asking, “Why won’t you look at me, my brothers, why won’t you take my eyes.” There is a wish to return to the first-person plural narrative style that predominates the majority of the book––the “We” that opens the text––but a foreclosure to this possibility. In asking his brothers to look, there is also a wish to be included in their group, to become a threesome again. However, the narrator is rejected, refused, and forced into the first person singular mode, “my.” Importantly, we also discussed the violence in this desire to be seen: what if we take the narrator at his word and actually take his eyes? Is this a desire for the “nothing, just this, just this” that open the novel; a hunger for less burden that becomes oblivion instead? How do we contend with pleasure in “nothing”?

This desire for self-annihilation seems to be connected to the narrator’s sexual experimentation and awakening. After considering his family’s un-rootedness in up-state New York (their lack of history in the region), it seems that the narrator finds a form of self-definition through his sexual encounters. We the Animals begins through a first-person plural description (“we”)––a formal quality that indicates the three brothers’s unity. Yet, as the narrative progresses, we see the separation of the brothers as the narrator not only becomes an individual “I” but also loses a sense of kinship and becomes increasingly isolated. While the narrative has many questions that it leaves unanswered, many white spaces with which to contend, perhaps in “being made” the narrator attempts to not only distinguish himself from his brothers but attempt to define himself outside of his familial relationships.

We spent a great deal of time in class discussing the narrative break that happens the final pages of the novel; a formal quality that mirrors the psychic break in the narrator himself. The ending of the novel, to me, is brutal (another element of the text that is difficult to contend with: how do we discuss violent and difficult material that is rendered in aesthetically beautiful ways?). We see the narrator fully separate from his family, describing not Paps and Ma but “A father,” “A mother,” and himself as “a son.” Defined through their roles (archetypes), the family, heartbreakingly, comes together through the narrators’s suffering: where before Paps was violent and inconsistent, “A father” is now lovingly bathing his son, whispering to him; where before Joel and Manny were fighting, “the boys” are now helping getting the narrator in the car. It is through the narrator’s trauma that a new family structure is formed, and a loving one at that.

Finally, we concluded with a careful examination of the final page of the novel, “Zookeeping.” Students questioned whether the narrator would ever be able to “walk upright” again, mostly convinced that he was stuck in the mental institution. In the narrator’s claim that “I’ve lost my pack,” students read isolation and despair, a desire to return to a “We” that will never take place. In this final moment, students read his dreaming of “standing upright, of uncurled knuckles, of a simpler life” as the narrator defining himself as an animal and the impossible wish to be human (again?). However, I tried to play devils advocate (something I don’t think worked) by asking two things: 1) can we see the various animals that surround him and crown him king as a new form of kinship and acceptance? 2) If there is no love and acceptance and the narrator desires to walk upright again, rejoin his pack, is the final line of the novel something that will, in fact, be fulfilled? “Upright, upright,” I say, I slur, I vow.

If you haven’t seen the movie adaptation, run don’t walk to see it!