We the Animals: 17. Niagara Summary & Analysis

Paps has to deliver a package to Niagara Falls, so he takes the narrator with him, pulling only him out of school because Manny and Joel are failing their classes. Leaning over the edge at the falls, the narrator stares at the rushing water while his father holds him. Standing like this, Paps points out that the narrator would die if he let go of him. Later that day, he brings the narrator to a small museum and gives him five dollars, telling him to wait here until he returns. Bored, the narrator wanders through the tiny exhibits. Multiple hours pass, but his father hasn’t returned, so he sits in a room where a movie plays on repeat, showing footage of people going over the waterfall in barrels.

Eventually, a museum clerk comes in and asks where the narrator’s parents are, and when the narrator says that Paps will be back soon, the man looks concerned. Before exiting the room, he says he wants to talk to Paps at the ticket booth when he arrives. Alone again, the narrator starts dancing in the projector’s shifting light, letting the image of the rushing water play over him as he gracefully moves his body. When he looks up, he sees Paps watching him from the doorway. They stop for dinner on the drive home, and Paps tries to make the narrator laugh. However, the narrator is angry at him for leaving him behind for so long, so he doesn’t respond to his father’s attempts to cheer him up.

After many hours on the road, Paps and the narrator finally pull into the driveway late that night, at which point Paps starts speaking as if they’re in the middle of the conversation. He says he was standing in the doorway of the museum and watching the narrator dance, and though he doesn’t know what to make of this, he says he couldn’t help but think about how pretty his son was in that moment. “Goddamn,” he thought to himself, “I got me a pretty one.”