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
At dinner one night, the phone rings. Ma doesn’t get up to answer it, but she says it must be Paps. The boys sit at the table and listen to it ring, waiting for her to answer, but she refuses. When it starts to ring a second time, Manny says he’ll answer, but Ma smashes his dinner bowl on the floor before he can get up. After dinner, Paps comes home, and Manny locks himself in his bedroom while Joel and the narrator sneak into the crawlspace beneath the stairs and pretend to talk on the phone, enacting a conversation between their parents, saying that they miss each other.
Caught in the middle of their parents’ turbulent relationship, the narrator and his brothers have two choices: they can either get involved, or try to steer clear of anything that might take place between Ma and Paps. But when Manny decides to answer the phone (clearly wanting his father to return), Ma reacts violently, showing the boys that she won’t actually let them get involved. Accordingly, Manny locks himself in his bedroom, and the narrator and Joel shut themselves into the crawlspace, taking refuge in one another and pretending to be their parents. This game, it seems, is the only safe way for them to engage with their current reality.
Themes
On the fake phone call, Joel and the narrator apologize to each other. Pretending to be Paps, Joel says he got a job, but then the conversation takes a turn and the boys ask each other—still in character—what they’re going to do. The narrator doesn’t quite know what they’re talking about anymore, but he and Joel continue the exchange. He asks Joel if things will be like this forever, and Joel assures him they won’t. When the narrator asks what they’re supposed to do now, Joel says, “Well, we’ll do whatever it takes, I guess.” The narrator no longer knows which parent Joel is imitating, and when he asks Joel what, exactly, it takes, Joel says he doesn’t know.
Pretending to be their parents is Joel and the narrator’s way of coping with the anger and division running throughout their family. Because there is so much uncertainty in their lives, though, this mock conversation becomes serious in a way neither boy fully understands. As they parrot things they’ve clearly heard their parents say in the past, they try to piece together what their future will look like, but this is nearly impossible because riding the ebbs and flows of Ma and Paps’s relationship is the only existence they’ve ever known.
Themes
