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 evening, the narrator and his brothers play a three-person version of foursquare. Each time they smack the ball, they imitate their father, saying things like, “This is for raising your voice,” and “And this is for embarrassing me in public.” Whenever a car passes carrying other children, they stick their tongues and middle fingers out at them, feeling glorious with their anger beneath the beautiful fading sky. At one point, Manny starts talking about magic. Recently, he has been talking about God, and now he tells his brothers that there are two kinds of magic: white magic and black magic. Saying this, he leads them into the woods to try to find poisonous mushrooms, which are evidence of the black magic God put on earth.
The angry expressions the boys call out while playing are reflections of their father’s aggression. Unable to stop Paps’s violence, they incorporate his hostile mentality into their everyday lives, thereby normalizing it in a way that just might make it easier for them to cope with the trauma of living in constant fear of his animosity. By this point in the novella, it’s clear that they are growing up and gaining some independence, as they strike out into the woods on their own and generally seek ways of entertaining themselves beyond the tense environment of their home.
Themes
It’s dark out, but the brothers don’t want to go home. They heard other parents calling their children in for dinner, but Ma and Paps haven’t summoned them (nor, it seems, will they). Moving through the dark woods, Manny and Joel decide to hurl their hard rubber ball at a camper stationed behind their neighbors’ house. They don’t know this family all that well, except that they’re white and that they have a boy several years older than them. Taking turns, Manny and Joel try to break the camper’s window. After the first hit, a light goes on inside, and then Manny throws a rock, which shatters the glass. Instantly, the boys start running, turning only to see that the family’s son—whom the narrator refers to as “the headbanger”—has come outside to investigate.
It seems that Ma and Paps have two distinct modes of parenting: either Paps violently polices the boys’ behavior, or both he and Ma pay them no attention at all. Accordingly, the boys are able to enjoy quite a bit of freedom. In fact, they are completely at liberty to act out without consequences because of their parents’ absent style of caring for them. It’s no surprise, then, that they do things like throw rocks at the neighbors’ camper, behaving badly simply because they can (and perhaps as a way of seeking out attention from others, including their parents).
Themes
The boys hide in the woods as the headbanger tracks them. When he gets close, Manny emerges and sits on a nearby log, and his brothers follow suit. The headbanger asks them how they’re doing, knowing they broke his camper’s window. Still, he seems friendly enough. The narrator notes that the headbanger has recently been trying to befriend them, though they don’t know why. They think it might be due to the fact that they’re the only other people out past dinnertime, though the narrator admits that his desire to befriend them could be more sinister. All the same, the boys don’t identify with him, thinking of him as the kind of “white-trash” their parents have warned them to avoid. Plus, they don’t need him, since they have each other. Indeed, even if the narrator’s brothers often call the narrator a “faggot” and a “pest,” they are all still very close.
This is the first time in the novella that the narrator specifically addresses the way his brothers taunt him for failing to conform to their ideas about what it means to be a man (or, at least, what it means to be male, since they’re still just boys). He reveals that they call him derogatory names like “faggot,” and though it’s clear that they say this in jest, their jokes hint at a certain tension developing between the brothers, one based on Manny and Joel’s discomfort with the idea that the narrator isn’t tough and macho like them. And yet, this internal rift pales in comparison to gulf that the three of them sense between themselves and the headbanger, whose race and socioeconomic class set him apart from them. This makes it difficult for them to understand why, exactly, he would want to befriend them.
Themes
The headbanger tells the narrator and his brothers he wants to show them something, and though the narrator is deeply hesitant, he follows as his brothers agree to go with the headbanger back to his house, where he takes them to the basement. Upon entering, the brothers are unsettled by the dank room’s smell, but the headbanger tells them to stop acting scared, so they pretend to be tough and uninterested. In one of the corners, they see, the headbanger has constructed a makeshift room using two discarded window shutters. Entering this small space, they find a TV and a VCR, into which the headbanger inserts a videotape. Onscreen, a white teenager lies reading on a bed, and then his father enters and admonishes him for failing to do the dishes.
The boys’ interaction with the headbanger is very strange and sinister, but none of them want to be the one to express their fear or concern. Believing that they must be manly in the stereotypically traditional sense of the word, they think that admitting their fear would be embarrassing. In reality, though, their unwillingness to voice their hesitations leads them into a precarious situation, one in which they find themselves crowded in a stranger’s basement watching a videotape that is likely pornographic in a very disturbing way, since one of the subjects onscreen is a minor (and the other character appears to be his father).
Themes
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Watching the headbanger’s strange video, the narrator remembers when—a few months before—a mother and her daughter accidentally entered the men’s changing room at the public pool, where he, Paps, his brothers, and other men were in various states of undress. Startled, the mother impulsively put her hand over her daughter’s eyes and said, “My goodness.” Although the boys and men in the changing room normally didn’t look at or acknowledge each other, they suddenly exchanged glances and burst into laughter. Now, the three brothers sit transfixed before the headbanger’s TV, certain that there really are such things as black magic. It’s soon quite clear that the tape is pornographic, and the narrator thinks about how there’s nobody to stop them from seeing what they’re about to see, nobody like that girl’s mother to shield their eyes.
In an odd way, the experience of watching the headbanger’s disturbing video is something of a bonding experience, since all three brothers are forced to endure this unsettling thing together. Unfortunately, though, none of them think to shield one another’s eyes, nor do they volunteer to be the one to suggest that they leave. In this way, they fail to take care of each other in the way they normally support one another. This, in turn, proves that, though they’re capable of looking out for each other in the absence of parental guidance, there are some things that are simply too adult for them to handle as a threesome of young brothers.
Themes
