Love And Violence In We The Animals By Justin Torres

We the Animals by Justin Torres is a novel about three brothers of white and Puerto Rican descent who experience a rough and tumultuous life of poverty, abuse, confusion, loneliness, and imagination. Throughout the book, we see how the family evolves and specifically how the youngest brother grows in his identity, both sexually and in his role within his family. A crucial theme in We the Animals is love; the confusing dysfunctional way love is portrayed in this novel shows how the family members are like ‘animals’ and how they have their own strange ‘wild’ way of interacting with each other.
Love in this novel is often tied to tender emotions and these emotions are equated with love and violence within their family relationships. In chapter 15, Paps beats Manny because he and his brothers decided to sleep in the woods without supervision, he then apologized and said that he only beat him because he was afraid that they might have been hurt. Paps justified his physical violence

Since violence is the main way love is portrayed within the boy's family, when it is lacking in their life, it feels as if love is also lacking in their life. The narrator senses that his academic success and emerging sexual identity are putting him at odds with his brothers and the readers see provoking his brothers into hurting him. This is how violence has created a dysfunctional reality for the boys that imitates an animal-like environment. Humans are thought to be relational, empathetic, kind beings that choose nurture over nature, families stereotypically are close and use a certain approach when it comes to one another. However, animals are thought of as beings that choose survival over love and family, baby animals start to learn how to survive on their own in harsh conditions exceedingly early on, just like the boys in We the Animals, who were exposed to harsh environments early