Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in We the Animals, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Belonging
Violence, Aggression, and Love
Support and Caretaking
Masculinity and Coming of Age
Summary
Analysis
One summer morning, the narrator and his brothers wake up to find Paps digging a hole in the backyard. They joke that he’s digging a grave, but then Manny suggests that it’s a trench. For several weeks, the boys have been obsessed with pretending they’re in the army, since Ma brought home old ill-fitting army fatigues for them. Still, Joel maintains that the hole is a grave, not a trench, though he doesn’t know whose—perhaps, he says, it’s Ma’s grave, or the narrator’s. When the boys finally approach their father, they find him lying in the ditch. “I’ll never get out of here,” he says, staring up at them. When they try to pull him up, he playfully pulls them into the hole, and dirt rains down on them all.
Paps’s behavior in this scene recalls the defeatist attitude he displayed after getting into an argument with the white security guard. In both cases, he exhibits depressive qualities, this time implying that his life would be better if he remained inert in the ground. However, he mixes this melancholy sentiment with a sense of playfulness by pulling the boys into the ditch with him, once more combining sorrow and joy in a way that endears him to his sons even as he struggles to be happy.
Themes
Exiting the hole, Paps goes to get Ma from work, but several hours later Ma returns drunk and angry, wanting to know where Paps is. All the boys can tell her, though, is that he dug a trench and then left. When they voice the idea that perhaps the hole is a grave, Ma pauses and tells them all to go take naps. She then goes outside and lies in the hole. Just as she does so, it begins to rain, and the boys suggest that the hole is magic. When she finally comes inside, they help her towel off, and she asks (rhetorically) if Paps thinks she’s simply going to “take this.” Having decided not to let Paps come near Ma for the rest of the day (if he comes home), the boys go one by one to the hole, each of them lying inside it beneath the rain.
Everyone in the narrator’s family is apparently compelled by the hole Paps dug in the backyard, finding it oddly alluring. This is perhaps because they live a difficult life and therefore welcome any opportunity to change their perspectives—something that lying in a hole might help them do. Ma, for her part, lies in the hole because Paps has once again disappointed her by disappearing and failing to pick her up from work. Feeling desperate and raw, then, she has a cathartic experience beneath the rain while lying in the ditch.
Themes
When it’s the narrator’s turn to visit the hole, he takes off his clothes and gets in. Instantly, he feels that the hole is a grave—his grave. Because he thinks it might be magic, though, he stays in it, feeling far away from everyone in the house. Gazing up, he feels movement, as if he’s both sinking and floating at the same time. Feeling pleasantly disoriented, he makes a wish, though he never specifies what it is. All the same, he gets lost in the moment, and it isn’t until he hears Joel, Manny, Ma, and Paps laughing above him that he snaps back to attention. His brothers laugh at him, calling him a baby, and Ma affectionately tells him he can come out now. Paps, for his part, reaches down and helps him up, informing him that the war has ended.
What’s perhaps most interesting about We The Animals is the ways in which it combines simple childhood wonder with deeper, more complex emotions. For all intents and purposes, this particular vignette about lying in a hole is just a quirky, beautiful story about a strange afternoon the narrator passes with his family. However, there is something touching and sad about the fact that the narrator lies in the hole for so long, clearly appreciating this solitude. His contemplative nature in this scene hints that he isn’t fully content in his everyday life, and though the anecdote ends on a playful note, the fact that readers never learn what, exactly, he thinks about while lying in the hole suggests that he feels things he isn’t comfortable sharing—an important notion, since the novella eventually centers on his inability to be truthful with his family about who he is and the life he wants to lead.
Themes
