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17. Niagara
Themes
and Colors
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
The boys are teenagers now and have spent their entire lives as a triumvirate of sorts. Standing one snowy night on a loading dock, they smoke cigarettes and talk about robbing stores. As an aside, the narrator notes that—in the years to come—one of the brothers will drive his own face into a mirror because of a woman, and another will “slice up his arms.” They will also fail in class, get into car accidents, look at pornography, drop out of school, hang out with people who eventually seem vastly different than them, since they see themselves as “mutts,” estranged from other Puerto Ricans just as much as they’re estranged from white people. For now, though, they stand proudly on the loading dock, feeling tough and invincible.
In the novella’s second-to-last chapter, Torres focuses closely on the topic of identity, as the three brothers work hard to define who they are and where they fit into the world. When they talk about robbing stores, they demonstrate their desire to seem tough and daring—a mentality that Torres implies leads to lives of destruction and calamity, ultimately suggesting that this kind of macho posturing can be toxic and dangerous to a person’s overall wellbeing. Torres also draws attention to the fact that the boys feel out of place in their predominantly white community, having taken to heart Paps’s notion that they are “mutts” who don’t fit in anywhere.
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Themes
Standing with his brothers in the snow, the narrator exists both “inside and outside their understanding.” He makes them uncomfortable because they can sense that he’s different. To that end, they think he will experience a life they themselves will never know, and they resent him for his academic success and for the general way he moves through the world. Feeling this way, they’re jealous of him even as they’re also proud, wanting to protect him at any cost.
The narrator and his brothers have a complicated relationship. This is because the brothers don’t know how to process the fact that he isn’t exactly like them. Whereas they have trouble in school, he excels and is intellectually curious. Furthermore, they champion a kind of masculinity that doesn’t resonate with the narrator, and though he apparently tries to hide this by talking like Manny and Joel, it’s clear to them that this is an act. As they grapple with this uncomfortable truth, they simultaneously resent and admire him. And though this is a fraught dynamic, the narrator’s brothers are still protective of him, once more illustrating how accustomed they are to caring for one another because of their overall lack of parental guidance.
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Themes
The boys drink liquor and walk around in the snow. Upon finding a litter of homeless cats, they buy a carton of milk and set it out for the kittens. Manny wonders aloud how long it will take for the kittens to turn on the runt of the litter—a statement that makes him and Joel laugh, though it offends the narrator, who knows that he’s the runt of their family. Angrily, he swears at them and says he’s tired of “creeping around.” He then calls Manny a creep, criticizing him for talking about God so much but also talking about girls as if he has a sex life, which, the narrator suggests, he doesn’t. When Joel laughs—astonished that the narrator is so brazenly insulting Manny—he turns on him, too, saying that he’s “ignorant” and that both of them embarrass him.
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Recently, Ma and Paps have been talking to the narrator about his academic success, telling him that he’ll be able to live an easier life than anyone else in his family—an idea he resents. Having challenged his brothers, he now faces them and waits for a beating. Manny picks up a branch and holds it close to his face while Joel holds his arms back. While Manny threatens him, he thinks about the branch hitting him in the head and yearns for the pain, so he pleads with Manny to hit him.
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After pretending to wind up, Manny drops the stick and becomes serious, saying that there really is something “fucked up” about the narrator, saying, “Let’s talk about that.” However, they don’t talk about it because, as the narrator notes, they can’t. Instead, they light new cigarettes, and Manny says that Ma told him several days ago that the narrator can accomplish anything in life. Joel chimes in to say that she told him the same thing. Going on, they say that Ma told them to protect him from other kids—and from himself. Hearing this, the narrator backs away from his brothers until he’s turning a corner in full retreat while they yell after him, calling him “girlie” and asking where he’s going. On his own now, he wonders if there is any other boy on earth like him.
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Themes
The narrator walks the three miles to the town’s bus station, a place he’s been visiting frequently. When the parking lot has enough buses, he can emerge from the woods and walk between two buses to the public bathroom without the risk of anyone seeing him. He has been doing this for weeks, though all he’s done is stand in the bathroom, unsure of how to indicate to the men around him that he’s “ready.” The closest he’s gotten to having contact with another man came when he was standing by the sinks and a stranger took his face in his hands, called him a “cute kid,” and told him to leave. Now, though, there is only one bus in the parking lot, and as he passes the door opens. The driver asks if he’s going to New York, but the narrator simply tells him he needs to pee.
The driver tells him he can’t pee in the public restroom at this time of night, though he doesn’t answer why. Instead, he says that he told everyone hoping to board the bus for New York to go home and come back in the morning because of the snow. He then tells the narrator that, if he has to pee so badly, he should board the bus and use its bathroom. He accepts this offer and hears the door shut behind him, and as he asks where the bathroom is, the driver stands before him. The narrator doesn’t move, wanting what he hopes will happen next. Sure enough, the driver reaches into the narrator’s pants, his fingers cold as he says, “You want me to make you, I’ll make you.” Later, on his way home, the narrator triumphantly yells, “He made me! I’m made!”
Back at home, the narrator enters to find his entire family sitting together, a heaviness hanging over them. When they look at him, he’s shocked by the intensity of their eyes, and he senses that something has been lost forever—things will never again be easy between him and his family. With tears on her face, Ma says something, but the narrator doesn’t hear her because he sees his journal sitting in her lap. Inside this journal, he knows, are long, detailed descriptions of his fantasies about the men at the bus station. These entries are intense and graphic, and the narrator feels at once that they’re perverse. Just then, everything in him seems to drop to the floor, and he falls to his knees, looking at his mother and saying, “I’ll kill you.”
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Enraged that the narrator would threaten his own mother, Paps jumps at him, but Manny and Joel manage (for the first time ever) to keep him back. The narrator observes as the struggle between his father and brothers turns into an “embrace,” in which Manny and Joel support Paps even as they keep him from lunging forward. Seeing this, he understands once and for all that his entire family has read his journal and knows about his fantasies.
In just two hours, the narrator will find himself en route to the hospital, where his parents will check him into a psych ward. In retrospect, he recognizes that he must have wanted his journal to be found—otherwise, he wouldn’t have written down his fantasies. Before this realization and before the hospital, though, he looks at his family members in the living room, his brothers holding up Paps, his mother putting a hand on his chest to keep him back. This is the last time, the narrator notes, that all five of them are together, and he retrospectively believes that he could have stood up and let them embrace him. Instead of doing this, though, he acts like an animal, trying to tear their faces with his hands and, when this proves impossible, attacking his own face. Soon enough, they’re trying to restrain him even as he challenges them.
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When the narrator calms down, Paps takes him in his arms and brings him to the bathroom, where he lowers him into the bathtub and fills it with water. He then sets about taking off the narrator’s clothes and bathing him. While he gently washes his son’s body, Ma collects the narrator’s belongings, packing them up and bringing them to the truck, where Manny and Joel sit warming up the cabin and testing the windshield wipers. Returning, she sits on the closed toilet seat as Paps clips the narrator’s toenails. Sitting there, she wants to tell him that he can put as much hate on her as he wants, but she remains silent while Paps whistles a song—his way, the narrator believes, of saying goodbye. “Yes, ma’am,” Paps says to Ma. “We’re going to get him fixed up.”
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