Esteban Echeverria's The Slaughter House

The privative man is not human; he is a barbarian. A violent, brutish man that breaks all the laws of civilization, as if he were non-human. When discussing the barbarian, the animal is never far behind. They are inseparable – intertwined – for, after all, the barbarian emerged from the animal. In Esteban Echeverria’s “The Slaughter House,” the city of Buenos Aires suffers from a meat scarcity during Lent due to the impediment of immense floods. After the floods have receded, the government orders for the slaughter of fifty steers to feed the city. Rejoicing in the return of meat and starving to be fed, the people head to the slaughter house to view the killings. As the people’s anticipation escalates, the narrator recounts the grotesque and

When introducing the slaughter house, the narrator describes “forty-nine steers [that] were stretched out upon their skins and…two hundred people walk[ing] about the muddy, blood-drenched floor” that shows the grotesque violence occurring within the slaughter house. Animal intestines are strewn across the ground. Butchers angrily slice the meat. Blood drenches the floor and even the people. One woman has “huge chunks of coagulated blood…rained upon her head” (19). The narrator displays a mixing between animal and human bodies, and it is only at the slaughter house where they intersect. Animals are rarely seen beyond the slaughter house throughout the story, and, if they are, they are drawn to its violence. Echeverria writes, “A flock of bluewhite gulls, attracted by the smell of blood, fluttered about, drowning with strident cries all the other noises and voices,” showing the indistinguishability between them (17). Thus, by placing these violent, brutal people and animals in the same setting, Echeverria affirms the inseparability between animality and barbarism in which the two exist in the same