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 family visits a lake. The narrator and Ma don’t know how to swim, so Paps paddles them into deeper waters. He keeps swimming and swimming, taking them to the center of the lake. This frightens Ma, who tells him not to go too far, but Paps ignores her. The narrator wonders where his father learned to swim, noting that Paps seems to know everything about survival. He is, the narrator thinks, nearly “indestructible.” Ma, for her part, doesn’t know how to swim because she grew up in Brooklyn and never had a chance to learn. The narrator, on the other hand, has lived in upstate New York for his entire life, surrounded by lakes. When Ma asks why he can’t swim, he can’t bring himself to give her the answer, which is that he’s simply too afraid to try.
This family trip to the lake quickly devolves into a meditation on just how much the narrator can depend upon his parents. As Paps drags him and his mother to the deepest waters, readers are forced to admit that he’s solely responsible for their wellbeing—a frightening prospect, considering that Paps isn’t always much of a caretaker. What’s more, the narrator’s inability to admit he’s scared illustrates that he’s tragically hesitant to share his true feelings with his family, worried they won’t accept him because he isn’t tough in the way that his father and brothers are.
Themes
Once in the middle of the lake, Paps announces that the narrator and Ma are going to finally learn how to swim. Saying this, he lets go of them, and Ma instantly panics. She grabs the narrator, clawing at him and trying to use him to stay afloat. In the car on the ride home, she makes Manny sit next to Paps in the front because she’s too angry to be near her husband. When Paps asks her how else the narrator is going to learn to swim, she reaches across the narrator and opens the door. The pavement rushing by, she asks Paps if she should teach the narrator how to fly. Nervously, Paps pulls over, at which point the boys get out of the car to pee by the side of the road while their parents argue.
Again, it’s quite obvious that the narrator cannot depend on his parents to protect him in the way most children can look to their guardians for support. Instead, he must constantly remember that his parents are volatile, unpredictable people who might very well put him in danger. Consequently, he must cultivate a form of independence that will enable him to survive when his true caretakers—his brothers—aren’t there to help him.
Themes
Outside the car, Manny and Joel ask the narrator what, exactly, happened in the lake, and he tells them that Ma climbed onto him and almost drowned him. This infuriates Manny, who says, “What kind of…” but doesn’t finish his sentence. The boys then hear Ma yelling at Paps to let her go. When they’re all back in the car, Paps drives in silence with his hand placed on the back of Ma’s neck. After a while, he turns around and asks the narrator what he thought of his first flying lesson, and the entire family bursts into laughter.
When the narrator and his family laugh at Paps’s joke, they prove that they’ve become inured to animosity, anger, and aggression. Indeed, Paps left both Ma and the narrator to drown, Ma endangered the narrator by opening the car door, and Paps grabbed hold of Ma in a violent manner during their argument—and yet, the family finds itself capable of laughing in unison before they even reach home again. In turn, it becomes obvious that they’re quite used to this tumultuous dynamic. In fact, their ability to laugh in this moment is more than a sign that they’re accustomed to troubling circumstances; it’s also a way of coping with these circumstances.
Themes
Despite his laughter, though, the narrator thinks in bed that night about what happened at the lake. He remembers diving deep to escape Ma, frantically wriggling in the water until he realized he was swimming on the surface just like Paps had tried to teach him when he was younger. Ma was clutching Paps once again, and they both watched as the narrator came up from the depths of the water and began to swim. He remembers seeing how happy and relieved they were—Ma started crying, and Paps shouted out, saying, “He’s alive!”
As this scene demonstrates, some of the troubling things that take place in We The Animals do not have completely negative results. It’s easy to say that the trick Paps pulls in the lake is cruel and even abusive, but it is this very act that pushes the narrator out of his comfort zone in a way that allows him to finally start swimming on his own. Therefore, it’s arguable that Paps’s decision to let go of Ma and the narrator is a necessary step toward helping his son learn how to be independent. At the same time, though, the fact remains that this method of teaching the narrator to swim is quite harsh and ultimately rather dangerous, thereby aligning with Paps’s abusive tendencies.
Themes
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