The narrator and his brothers refer to their teenaged neighbor as “the headbanger.” He is what they think of as “white trash” and they therefore find him unrelatable, though he makes an effort to befriend them. One night, the boys throw a rock at the camper parked behind the headbanger’s family’s house. The rock breaks the window, at which point the headbanger comes outside and tracks them down. Instead of being angry, though, he says he wants to show them something. Taking them to his basement, he plays them a videotape of a father sexually abusing his son, and though none of the boys want to see this, they don’t know how to stop it from happening.
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The Headbanger Character Timeline in We the Animals
The timeline below shows where the character The Headbanger appears in We the Animals. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
16. Wasn’t No One To Stop This
...running, turning only to see that the family’s son—whom the narrator refers to as “ the headbanger ”—has come outside to investigate.
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The boys hide in the woods as the headbanger tracks them. When he gets close, Manny emerges and sits on a nearby log, and...
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The headbanger tells the narrator and his brothers he wants to show them something, and though the...
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Watching the headbanger ’s strange video, the narrator remembers when—a few months before—a mother and her daughter accidentally...
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