I wrote this paper on Justin Torres’ We the Animals for my class, Intro to Fiction. It took me ~10 hours of focused work and many more hours of procrastination: I was trying to find a serious thesis and robust textual support for it. I think it’s still clearly worse than much of my non-literary criticism writing. Maybe this post is interesting as a datapoint on how well a nonfiction writer of my quality can do literary criticism under time pressure.

Another note: it assumes you’ve read We the Animals, and spoilers abound.

It’s easy to interpret Paps as exercising power crudely over the narrator. However, Paps is significantly more empathetic with the narrator than a shallow reading would suggest. Rather, it is Manny and Joel who try to exert power over the narrator in nakedly masculine ways. I argue that this is because they lap up Paps’ performed masculinity all too well, while inheriting none of his nuance.

To begin with, it would help to count down the contrasts in how Paps and the narrator’s older brothers exert power over him.

The first and most obvious parallel is between the porn scene in “Wasn’t No One to Stop This” and the bathtub scene in “The Night I Am Made”. In the porn film, the character of the father orders the son to “[p]ull down [his] underwear”, and then spanks him. Watching the film is a novel sexual experience for the three brothers: “We had seen flesh, women, sex parts, and sex acts, but only in still pictures. This man, this teenager, they were alive, or had been once…” Manny and Joel don’t react with considerable maturity: they become speechless and embarrassed. “Why won’t you look at me, my brothers,” the narrator asks, “why won’t you take my eyes?”

Compare this to the bathtub scene in the “Dawn” sequence in “The Night I Am Made”: a father and a son, alone. “The father pulls down the boy’s underwear, and [the narrator] is naked.” But there is not a hint of inappropriateness or embarrassment here. Rather, the moment is one of understanding. Paps says, “Ain’t nobody going to leave you alone. Not when you’re all worked up like this.” He “speaks of cultures where to wash a man’s feet is to pay him the ultimate respect”.

Second, Paps and the brothers think differently about sexuality and gender: Paps is unafraid to call his boy a “pretty one” (“Niagara”), while the brothers call him a woman as an insult (“Ducks”).

Third, consider that Paps encourages the narrator’s academic excellence while Manny and Joel disdain it. “Paps had held private conversations with me about my potential,” the narrator says, “about this bookishness that set me apart from my brothers” (“Midnight” in “The Night I Am Made”). Paps came from a place of mature pragmatism: he “hinted that I would have an easier time in this world than they had, than my brothers would ever have”. Compare this to the brothers: “They hated me for my good grades, for my white ways” (the opening sequence in “The Night I Am Made”).

Fourth, notice what Paps and Joel/Manny are doing in the climax (“Dawn” in “The Night I Am Made”). Paps is emotional: “a crisp lump in his throat”, he “whistles and hums; he is saying goodbye”. On the other hand, Manny and Joel “are happy and thankful to have simple work ahead of them… Their minds are not on the boy and the father in the bathroom. … Their minds are on the snow and ice, the simple problem of removal.”

It is especially notable that in the “Dawn” sequence, Torres switches to third person voice to let us inside the characters’ heads. We hear, for example, how despite saying nothing, Mom “wants to tell [the narrator] that he can put all his hate on her; she will take it all, if that’s what he needs her to do”. We are told “how badly the boy wishes to be out there with his brothers, doing as he is told”. It is notable that we are shown no such emotional complexity in the brothers.

Fifth, consider how casually Manny and Joel domineer the narrator physically, even in adulthood. Joel “[locks his] arms in a full nelson” as Manny “[pumps] two fake swings” at him with a tree branch (“Midnight” in “The Night I Am Made”). On the other hand, the only time Paps hits one of his sons, he apologizes “for using his fists”, telling Manny that “he was scared, that something serious could have happened to us” (“Trash Kites”). This is at odds with how Paps was himself treated as a child: “[Paps’] own Paps … beat him” (“Heritage”). Torres also describes Paps as physically imposing—he “[crowds] the kitchen” for example (“Heritage”)—which perhaps makes it easier to project physical violence onto him. The novel doesn’t have Paps remorselessly beat his children despite these facts.

We can listen to Paps himself for what he thinks power over his children means. When the narrator resists being washed, Paps says, “Everybody’s got rights. A man tied to a bed got rights. … Yeah, you got rights. What you don’t got is power.” Paps’ way of exerting power over his son is… giving him a bath. This tenderness, rather than verbal abuse or a beating, is his final exercise of power. This complicates the reading where Paps is a one-dimensional, toxic masculine figure.

To be clear, this is not to absolve Paps of responsibility. His behavior is consistently misogynistic, from lying to fourteen-year-old Mom about whether she could get pregnant if she had sex with him (“Us Proper”), to physically (“Seven” and “Big-Dick Truck”) and sexually (“Ducks”) assaulting her. My argument is that Paps’ relationship with his son, the narrator, is more complex than one defined mainly by toxic masculinity.

I argue that Paps and the brothers differ in how they treat the narrator because the brothers absorb Paps’ performance of machismo, but they lack his social acuity and therefore miss the nuance in Paps’ masculinity.

First, note that Paps is often performing, acting the way he does to teach his children how to act. For example, Paps makes love to Mom in front of the children to show them how to treat a woman: “We watched him watching her, we studied his hunger, and he knew we were seeing and understanding.” (“You Better Come”) When Paps is teaching the boys to dance, he does so “as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, … as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe” (“Heritage”).

Second, note that Paps’ pedagogy succeeds. Manny and Joel do become their father in some ways: “their bodies were whittled-down versions of his own, our common face” (“Deep Night” in “The Night I Am Made”) and they “felt proud to be the kind of boys they were—boys who spat in public, … boys who looked you in the eye only to size you up or scare you off. When they bit the chapped skin from their lower lips, … they were looking at memories, proud memories, blood memories…” (opening sequence in “The Night I Am Made”).

Third, note that even though the brothers become their father, they don’t inherit their father’s keen sense of their social status. One of Paps’ earliest lessons to them is: “Mutts … You ain’t white and you ain’t Puerto Rican.” But the boys don’t realize that their white dockworker mates “are actually nothing like them at all” because “[w]ho knows this mutt life, this race mixing? Who knows Paps?” Paps has near-breakdowns because he cannot provide for his family: he digs himself a hole he’ll “never get out of” (“Trench”), and tells his wife “Nobody’s ever escaping this” after getting fired (“Night Watch”). Manny and Joel, on the other hand, have no one to provide for and finances don’t trouble them.

This world-weariness imbues Paps’ masculinity with a nuance that the narrator’s brothers fail to pick up: A boy bright enough to study his way out of poverty is not to be sneered at, the father knows. There are things more inappropriate than nudity.

To conclude, Paps meets his son at least somewhere in the middle while exerting control over his choices. Meanwhile, Manny and Joel often treat their brother in base, macho ways. They learn masculinity from their father’s performance, but Paps’ nuance is lost in transmission.