52 pages • 1 hour read
Justin TorresWe The Animals
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “We Wanted More”
The novel opens with the words, “We wanted more” (1). There are six hands grabbing at all of the food at the dinner table, touching all of the objects in the house, shoving each other. There are three brothers: Manny, Joel, and the narrator. They are clamorous, hungry, and violent, and they desire everything.
They follow behind their father, who gives them spankings. When he is gone, they all “[want] to be fathers,” too (2). They hunt for small animals in the woods to hear the creatures’ heartbeats and then throw them in a shoebox.
In contrast to their father, their mother is both loud and soft. She cries and tells them she loves them. Sometimes, she sleeps, and all is quiet.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Never Never Time”
The boys are in the kitchen, smashing tomatoes with a small mallet like they have seen a man do on television. When the tomatoes are gone they go into the bathroom and take tubes of their mother’s moisturizer. Tomato and lotion cover the kitchen, the boys’ clothes, and faces.
When their mother comes into the kitchen, she doesn’t immediately notice what’s going on. She works nights at a brewery. She is often confused about the time of day. She will begin making dinner in the morning or tell the boys to go to bed in the afternoon. But the boys have learned that when she orders them to do something—no matter how crazy it is—they have to listen.
Ma finally notices the boys’ actions, calling them over and touching the slime that drips down their faces: “‘That’s what you looked like when you slid out of me,’ she whisper[s] […]” (6). Their mother goes on talking about the details of their births, which disgusts the brothers. She asks them to “Make [her] born” (6). She suggests that they do it with ketchup.
They give her a raincoat. Manny points the bottle at her forehead. As soon as Joel raises the mallet, their mother screams and falls to the kitchen floor. Ketchup is everywhere and it looks like she’s been shot. “It’s a mom,” they yell, running around the room and banging ladles against pots. The boys say that “It’s never-never time!” (7).
Chapter 3 Summary: “Heritage”
When the boys get home from school, their father, Paps, is in the kitchen, cooking. He loudly sings along to Tito Puente on the radio. He begins to dance, waving a spatula around in the air. He includes the boys, grabbing their arms and pulling them behind him.
As he takes a sip of beer, the boys notice all of the empty cans on the counter behind him and roll their eyes. They continue dancing, forming a line behind him. Then Manny takes the lead and they dance behind him.
Paps asks them to “Shake it like [they’re] rich” (9). They lift their heads towards the ceiling and extend their pinky fingers. “You ain’t rich,” Paps says, then instructs them to “shake it like [they’re] poor” (9). They comply, dancing close to the floor, and with abandon. Then he tells them to “[s]hake it like [they’re] white” and then “like a Puerto Rican” (9-10).
They try to mambo, attempting to feel the rhythm of the music. Paps calls them “[m]utts” (9); they are neither white nor Puerto Rican, and their dad has to take over and show them how to mambo like a real Puerto Rican. His dancing is not even dancing, just natural movement. He reminds them that it is their heritage. It is as if they “could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still stepping and snapping perfectly in time” (11). His mambo manages to simultaneously demonstrate the boys’ roots and everything they can never be.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
These first three chapters establish the three brothers, who form the crux of We The Animals: Manny, Joel, and the narrator. It also details the roughness of their father, Paps, and the volatility and vulnerability of their mother, Ma. These chapters all touch upon the primal nature and origins of the three brothers.
The boys begin Torres’s novel hungry, wanting, and animalistic, with urges and instincts and rumblings. The spankings administered by Paps come off as a slow awakening to some enlightenment that will be eventually revealed but is never quite experienced, at least not by Manny and Joel. Like other victims of violence, the boys take it out on animals in the woods, trying to be their fathers by roughly taking baby birds out of their nests and looking into their eyes, then tossing them away. Ma is a delicate thing that they want to protect, a character that seems to need to be walled off from the world because she is always crying, and yelling, and loving them. In their simple wants, instinctive actions, and protective instincts, the boys are indeed the animals the title of the novel professes them to be.
In “Never Never Time,” the boys play a game involving slamming ketchup bottles with a mallet so that the condiment gets all over the kitchen and onto the boys themselves. The themes of chaos and destruction loom, as the kitchen becomes a mess and the brothers are drenched in ketchup, and then lotion. When Ma enters, she is not extremely alarmed about the havoc they have wreaked on the kitchen. She only sees them as they were when they came out of her, dripping with blood and placenta.
She would also like to be born, she tells them. This represents the idea that Ma would like to start her life all over and be born again into different circumstances. She goes through with her ketchup shower, which makes her “[look] like she had been shot in the back of the head” (7). After she is “born,” the boys run around screaming, “Happy Birthday!...Happy New Year!...It’s zero o’clock!...It’s never-never time!...It’s the time of your life!” (8), as if she has just emerged into the world and will begin anew. The words “never-never time” also echo Peter Pan’s Neverland: No one here will age or change; they are a part of their own universe, where mothers are delivered by boys in kitchens, and the boys themselves never grow up.
“Heritage” uses types of dance to illustrate who the boys are. Paps tells the boys to “[s]hake it like [they’re] rich”; after they demonstrate how they think rich people dance, he then says, “You ain’t rich” (9). He is helping them to define who they are not. They are also not poor, or totally white, or totally Puerto Rican. They cannot dance the mambo with the ease that their father does. They are “mutts,” as Paps calls them—half of one thing and half of the other, and do not have the confidence that comes from being sure of one’s identity. The fact that Paps defines them in the negative also shows an important aspect of his character. He has a tendency to be caustic. As he is dancing, he tells them that the dance is their heritage, but they are watching a heritage that they can never fully possess.
