Previous
10. You Better Come
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in We the Animals, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Belonging
Violence, Aggression, and Love
Support and Caretaking
Masculinity and Coming of Age
Summary
Analysis
Paps gets a job as a nighttime security guard, and because Ma also works nights, the boys accompany him on his shifts. One night, the narrator wakes up and finds his father sitting at the front desk smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. The narrator can’t sleep, so he crawls into Paps’s lap. Looking up, he sees a lightbulb in a small metal enclosure, so he asks Paps why it’s in a cage. Paps tells him it’s so the lightbulb—like a bird—won’t fly away. When the narrator asks him if he can unlock it, Paps doesn’t answer, simply saying, “What do you think?” The next thing he knows, the narrator wakes up to the sound of Paps cussing to himself, urgently telling him, Manny, and Joel to gather their things because they’re late; Paps fell asleep, and now the morning security guard has arrived.
Reading We The Animals, it’s easy to focus exclusively on Paps and Ma’s many failures as parents, but it’s important to remember that they’re struggling against poverty. Of course, this doesn’t excuse Paps’s abusive ways or Ma’s neglectful tendencies, but it does provide a contextual backdrop for some of their shortcomings as parents. In this scene, for instance, readers sense just how hard it must be for Paps to care for his children while also holding his job as a nighttime security guard. Though he often behaves poorly, in this moment he tries to support his children by looking after them and making money for the family at the same time—two things that are undoubtedly quite difficult to do at once.
Themes
In the commotion of trying to round up their belongings, Manny starts laughing, but Paps slaps him across the face and tells him to take the narrator and Joel to the car, where they are to wait for him underneath their blankets. On their way out of the building, though, they encounter the new security guard, a white man who quickly notices that they’re carrying sleeping bags and asks what they were doing. Interjecting, Paps asks him if they can step aside for a talk, but the guard continues to address the boys, asking if their father has been making them sleep on the floor. Again, Paps tells them to go to the car, so they retreat, watching from the backseat as the two men talk. The boys can tell that Paps is yelling at the man, and Manny predicts that he’ll hit him.
Once again, Paps’s violent side comes out, this time because he’s worried he’ll lose his job for bringing his sons with him to his shift. Needless to say, he has no excuse to hit Manny, though it’s worth noting that everything else about this scene (at least up until this point) has humanized Paps by showing the fact that he’s working hard to support and look after his sons while also earning money to keep the family afloat. Unfortunately, though, he lets his anger get the best of him, perhaps because this is the only way he knows how to express his exasperation. As someone who resorts to anger and violence in the face of conflict, he is emotionally ill-equipped to handle situations like this one levelheadedly, which is why Manny worries that he’ll punch the other security guard.
Themes
In the car, Joel suggests to his brothers that the argument between Paps and the security guard isn’t their fault, since Paps himself fell asleep. However, Manny points out that Paps will still probably blame them, at least partially, since something is always their fault. As he says this, Paps walks over to where the guard set down a Styrofoam coffee cup and swats it to the ground before furiously getting into the car, grabbing Manny’s hair, and shouting for the keys. As they drive home, Manny works up the courage to ask if Paps is going to get fired, but Paps only laughs. When Manny asks what the guard said, Paps says, “What do you think?” and punches the ceiling. This, the narrator points out to his brothers, is exactly what Paps said the night before when he asked him if he could unlock the caged light.
Manny thinks Paps will blame him and his brothers because he’s used to receiving his father’s wrath, even when he doesn’t deserve it. This illustrates just how quick Paps is to take his anger out on his innocent sons, yet another indication that he resorts to violence when he doesn’t know how to process his emotions. In keeping with this, he punches the ceiling when Manny asks him if he’s going to get fired, declining to actually answer the question because—presumably—he finds it difficult to talk about what might happen. Instead of dealing with his feelings, then, he resorts to physical aggression.
Themes
From the backseat of the car, Joel says he’s certain his father could unlock the caged light. The other brothers agree, but Paps doesn’t say anything, simply clearing his throat, though he soon starts beating the dashboard with his hand, pounding out a slow, plodding rhythm. Watching, Joel asks if he’s crying, and the brothers wonder if it’s possible to cry with one’s fist, since what Paps is doing doesn’t quite seem like crying. However, they’ve never seen him cry, so they don’t know what it looks like. All the way home, Paps pounds out his beat, and the boys join him, slapping whatever is closest to them and adding words to the rhythm, chanting, “No More Work!” and “No More Floor!” and “No More Crying!”
Again, Paps expresses his emotions through physicality, though this time it isn’t in the form of violence. Instead, he pounds on the dashboard in a cathartic manner that doesn’t harm anyone else. In turn, the boys join him, sensing that his actions are imbued with deeper meaning, even if they don’t understand what, exactly, is going through his head. As they excitedly beat out this rhythm with their father, they combine cathartic joy with desperation, uniting around the hardship that Paps faces, which they sense affects them, too.
Themes
Get the entire We the Animals LitChart as a printable PDF.
The chanting continues even when Paps and the boys enter the house. The noise startles Ma, who rushes over to Paps on the couch and asks what’s wrong, though he doesn’t respond because he’s sitting with his face in his hands. As the boys chant “No More Crying!” Ma insists that Paps must be overtired, but he finally looks up and tells her that they’re never going to “escape.” In their confusion, the boys become quieter, very softly pounding out the beat. Gesturing all around him, Paps says that nobody in their family is going to escape all of “this,” and finally the boys go silent. Taking his hand and gripping it hard, Ma says in an alarmingly strong, calm voice, “Don’t you dare.”
The life Ma and Paps lead is not easy, as evidenced by the fact that Paps has to take his sons to work in order to look after them at night. Unfortunately, though, this causes him trouble at his job, putting him in a lose-lose situation; he must work in order to support his children, but this requires him to abandon them at night, leaving them without a caretaker. This dilemma is why he feels as if it’s impossible to “escape” life’s hardships, and even though the boys are acting rather joyfully in this moment, it’s clear that he feels nothing but despair. Because they must depend upon each other, though, Ma doesn’t let him speak this way, warning him against losing hope because this is simply not an option.
Themes
