We The Animals, By Justin Torres

We the Animals by Justin Torres depicts the story of a young boy who balances growing up amongst a complicated, often abrasive family with the intersection of his unique identities, both of which force him to see and understand how his own path will eventually differentiate itself from the life and society he’s been born into. This semi-autobiographical novel imagines and portrays the concepts of family in ways alternative to the standard and hegemonic norms, as they instead center around and stem from violence, brutality, and the cyclical effects of power imbalances that can begin from dominant authority figures and eventually influence and become ingrained in others, even children. In particular, the father’s treatment of the mother throughout

At home, this behavior is mirrored in their father, a brutish and domineering man who uses physical violence against not only the three boys but their mother as well. As the narrator describes certain scenes and events that he witnesses between his parents, there is a certain poignancy in how the children try to understand how their father treats their mother. “The faucet poked into the base of her spine, and it must have hurt her, all of it must have hurt her, because Paps was much bigger and heftier, and he was rough with her, just like he was rough with us. We saw that it must hurt her, too, to love him” (Torres 48). The boys are able to relate their own abuse at the hands of their father to the way their mother is treated, further supporting their beliefs that this is how the world works and normalizing the relationship between violence and love because of how present it is in their home. Their father is the main authority figure in their lives and family, and his influence on them is that much more powerful because of it. Even though violence in the home is a subversive and alternative form of how a family and love should function, it is what the children are born into and thus, what shapes them and how they interact with the world, for they know no other life and no other

They held me down on the ground; I bucked and spat and screamed my throat raw. I cursed them: we were, all of us, sons of whores, mongrels, our mother fucked a beast. They held me, pinned. At first they defended themselves, cursed me, slapped my face, but the wilder I became, the more they retreated into their love for me. Each of them. I chased them down into that love and challenged it [...] I said and did animal, unforgivable things. (Torres 118)

So enriched in his anger, so thick with the history and knowledge of the violence of his past, the narrator joins the cycle of abuse and his formerly childlike and innocent self transforms into one that inflicts violence, the one in power, the one who hurts and hates, the one that distorts and chases off love, the one that was born of his father’s hate, and the one that becomes it in the