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 day, the narrator and his brothers sneak into their neighbor’s garden. They refer to him as Old Man, and they brazenly stomp on his plants, eating whatever they find. When they look up, they see that Old Man is watching from his porch. He calls them locusts, and when Manny asks what this means, he quotes, “What the locust swarm left, the great locusts have eaten; what the great locusts have left, the young locusts have eaten; what the locusts have left other locusts have eaten.” Going on, he accuses them of invading his land, but he agrees to draw a picture of a locust for them, and he even invites them onto the porch. As the evening fades, they sit there on the porch, and Old Man teaches them how to stop mosquito bites from itching.
When Old Man quotes a Bible passage about locusts devouring plants, he frames the narrator and his brothers as insatiable and destructive. Because they don’t have anyone properly caring for them at home, they barge into the outside world and take what they need from other people, paying as little attention to matters of ownership as starving insects would pay. By pointing out this similarity, Old Man emphasizes the boys’ desperation, even if they themselves think they’re only invading his garden for fun. In reality, he recognizes that they’ve come to him because they have nowhere else to go, which is perhaps why he simply watches as they ruin his garden.
Themes
At one point, Manny tells Old Man that they ran away from home, and Joel says that their mother is dead. When Old Man goes inside the house to make the boys a salad, they find a wiffleball bat and start playing with it. Manny then tells Joel not to joke about Ma dying, and though the narrator notes that their mother is still distraught because Paps hasn’t come home, he thinks about the fact that she’s still very much alive. Joel, for his part, refuses to let Manny tell him what to do, so they start fighting while the narrator begs them to stop. As he does this, he thinks about how his mother often does the same thing to Paps, saying, “Stop, stop, stop.” When Old Man emerges from the house and sees Manny and Joel, he calls them animals and tells them to leave.
As Joel and Manny start fighting, the narrator finds himself in a familiar position, one in which it’s his job to get them to stop. Unfortunately, this is a role he knows all too well, since he has seen his mother beg his father to calm down when he’s overtaken by violent fits. In the same way that he finds himself imitating his mother, then, his brothers mirror Paps’s aggressive behavior, ultimately acting so destructively that Old Man sends them away without feeding them. In turn, readers see the adverse effect of violence and aggression on the boys’ lives, since they effectively cheat themselves out of a free (and rather necessary) meal.
Themes
