We the Animals Summary

The unnamed narrator spends the majority of his time with his brothers, Manny and Joel. They pass the time together when their mother remains in bed for days, creeping quietly through the house as if it’s their duty to avoid disturbing her. On their own, they make their own meals and keep themselves entertained, fearing that their father might come home and beat them for misbehaving. During Ma’s unresponsive periods, she’ll sometimes emerge suddenly from her bedroom in a state of confusion, not knowing what day or time it is. Once, she comes out in the middle of the night and asks Joel to borrow baking supplies from their neighbor so she can make Manny’s birthday cake. When Joel points out not only that nobody is awake at this hour, but that it’s not even Manny’s birthday, Ma pauses before saying, “I hate my life.”

One day, the narrator and his brothers use a mallet to smash tomatoes so the juices will splatter all over them. Eventually, Ma comes out of her bedroom and asks why they aren’t in school, and though it’s Sunday, none of them answer. She quickly forgets the matter when she sees what they’re doing. Instead of getting mad, she says in an awestruck voice that they look like they did when they first came out of her. She then asks them to make her look “born,” too, and they happily oblige, dancing around her as she lies on the floor dripping in tomato juices.

On another occasion, the boys come home to find their father cooking and listening to music. They’re afraid of him because he often uses physical force to punish them, but they sense that each beating has greater meaning, as if he’s trying to show them how to live. Now, as they enter the kitchen, they watch Paps dance and drink beer, and he encourages them to join. He instructs them to dance in different ways, telling them to dance like they’re rich, like they’re poor, like they’re white, and like they’re Puerto Rican. Each time, he tells them to stop, eventually calling them “mutts” because they’re neither fully white nor fully Puerto Rican, like him. Going on, he tells them to watch how he dances, and they try to discern what sets him apart from them.

Shortly after their dancing lessons, Paps comes home one day with Ma, whose face is covered in bruises. They ask what happened, and Paps claims that the dentist punched Ma before sedating her, which he says is how dentists loosen teeth. For the next few days, the brothers are forbidden from entering Ma’s room, but they finally go in on the morning of the narrator’s seventh birthday. Manny reminds Ma that it’s the narrator’s birthday, and she remarks that this means he’ll grow apart from her. This, she says, is what happened when Manny and Joel turned seven: they became “tough” like their father. Hearing this, Manny and Joel are confused but proud, and they exit the room as the narrator asks if she doesn’t love his brothers anymore. In response, she says she still loves them but that she had to change the way she loves them, since loving “big boys” requires a person to “meet tough with tough.” She then makes the narrator promise to stay six for the rest of his life, and he’s so overcome with love that he takes her face in his hands and kisses her. In doing so, he touches her bruises, causing her to swear and push him. By the time he hits the ground, he knows he has turned seven.

On another day, Paps takes the family to a lake. Ma and the narrator don’t know how to swim, so he drags them through the water until they’re in the center of the lake, at which point he lets go of them. Ma panics and clutches the narrator, pushing him underwater. To avoid her, he sinks down, and the next thing he knows, he’s swimming on the surface as Ma holds onto Paps and both of them cheer, ecstatic that he’s still alive. Despite this, though, Ma is so mad at Paps that she refuses to sit next to him on the ride home. As they drive, she reaches across the narrator’s lap and opens the door, asking Paps if she should give the narrator a flying lesson. Paps pulls over, and the boys walk away from the car while their parents violently argue, with Ma screaming at Paps to unhand her. Not long after this, the family is silent as Paps drives them the rest of the way home. Before the ride is over, he turns around and asks the narrator what he thought of his first flying lesson, and everyone—including Ma—bursts into laughter.

For a long period, Paps doesn’t come home. Ma stops going to work and, in fact, stops doing everything except sleeping. Once again, the brothers are forced to care for themselves while taking pains not to disturb their mother. Time passes, but there’s still no sign of Paps. Until, that is, the phone rings one night during dinner and Ma is certain it’s him. Instead of answering it, though, she lets it ring until it stops, but soon it starts again. Unable to bear the tension, Manny says he’ll answer the phone, but Ma picks up his dinner bowl and smashes it on the floor as a way of stopping him. Shortly thereafter, Paps returns, and Manny shuts himself in his room while the narrator and Joel hide in a crawlspace beneath the stairs, where they find an old phone and pretend to be their parents, apologizing to each other and making promises about how life will get better, though neither Joel nor the narrator fully understand what, exactly, they’re talking about.

Once Paps and Ma make up again, they shower each other with love. One day, the entire family crowds into the bathroom while Paps gives the boys a bath. As he does this, Ma stands at the sink and prepares for work. At one point, Paps lustfully grabs at her, and the boys feel excited because they sense that this is what their mother feels. Reveling in how close and happy their parents seem, they feel unspeakably happy. When Paps drains the tub and dries them off, they hide behind the shower curtain, knowing their parents will playfully try to “find” them. Instead of doing this, however, Ma and Paps start having sex. As the narrator peeks out at them, he sees his mother’s face and thinks she’s in pain, realizing it must hurt her to love a man like Paps. Upon opening her eyes, she sees him watching, so she tells Paps to stop and then instructs him to get her shoes so she can finish getting ready for work. When he goes to do this, she gets behind the shower curtain with her sons, and together they jump out at Paps when he returns, pinning him to the floor and tickling him as he lets out joyful screams. Eventually, Ma tries to shield him from the boys, so Manny slaps her in the middle of her back. The narrator and Joel wait to see if their father will punish Manny for doing this, and when Paps does nothing, all three of them start hitting and kicking their parents, angrily yelling at them for not trying to find them when they were hiding.

Soon after this, Paps gets a job as a nighttime security guard, but because Ma also works nightshifts, he has to bring the boys with him. Because he falls asleep with the narrator in his lap, he wakes up late one morning and frantically tells them to get in the car, but it’s too late: the morning security guard sees them. While the boys wait in the car, Paps argues with the other guard, knocking his coffee to the ground. On the way home, he starts to cry, though the boys don’t know what to make of this because he doesn’t simply let tears fall from his eyes. Instead, he pounds the dashboard with his fist, creating a rhythm that the brothers join, eventually chanting along. At home, they continue to chant while Paps sits defeatedly on the couch. When Ma asks what’s wrong, he says they’ll never “escape” the life they’re leading. Hearing this, Ma sternly says, “Don’t you dare.”

One night, Paps comes home and drags Ma to the bedroom to have sex even though she doesn’t want to. The next morning, she loads the boys into the car along with garbage bags full of their clothes. After driving for a short while, she pulls over and takes a nap at a park while the boys wander around trying to entertain themselves. When she finally wakes up that evening, she asks them to tell her what she should do, wanting to know if they should leave Paps. Unable to respond, they remain silent, so Ma loads them back into the car and drives home. Pulling into the driveway, the narrator feels disappointed, though he wouldn’t let himself feel this until it was absolutely clear they weren’t leaving.

Bored after dinner one night, the boys go into the woods and throw rocks at a camper behind their neighbors’ house. They run away when a rock breaks the camper’s window, but the neighbors’ older son—“the headbanger”—follows them. To their surprise, he isn’t mad when he catches up to them, instead saying he wants to show them something. Because none of them want to seem afraid, they follow him into his basement, where he shows them a videotape of a father sexually abusing his son. As he watches this, the narrator wishes there were somebody to stop him from seeing what’s playing out onscreen, but he realizes his brothers aren’t able to protect him from this.

Because the narrator’s grades are good, Paps decides to take him out of school for a trip to Niagara Falls, where he needs to make a delivery. While they’re there, Paps gives him money and leaves him at a museum, promising to be back soon. As the hours go by, the narrator becomes increasingly bored and angry, but he passes the time by dancing in an empty room where footage of the waterfall is projected on the wall. After quite some time, he turns to see his father watching him, but Paps doesn’t say anything until they’re pulling into their driveway late that night, at which point he says that—though he doesn’t know what to make of it—he couldn’t help but think that the narrator looked “pretty” while dancing to himself in the shifting light of the projector.

Several years later, the boys walk around in the snow one night smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol. They’re teenagers now, and they can all sense that the narrator is different from Manny and Joel. Frustrated that his brothers see him as different, the narrator provokes them, wanting them to beat him up. But Manny and Joel don’t take the bait, instead calling him “fucked up.” Consequently, he leaves them where they are, walking to the town’s bus station. He’s been visiting the public bathrooms at the station rather frequently, trying to work up the courage to have sex with one of the other gay men who use the restrooms as a meet-up. Tonight, he finds the station empty except for one bus, the driver of which invites him onboard and says, “You want me to make you, I’ll make you” while reaching into his pants. On his way home afterwards, the narrator yells out, “He made me! I’m made!”

At home, the narrator finds his family in the living room. His journal is open on Ma’s lap, and he knows instantly that she has read his detailed fantasies about having sex with other men. Falling to his knees, he says he’s going to kill her, causing his father to leap toward him. Manny and Joel restrain Paps, and though the narrator senses something like tenderness in the way his family looks at him, he mercilessly claws at them before turning on himself, scratching his own face. After calming the narrator down, Paps gives him a bath, washing him and clipping his toenails while his brothers wipe snow off the car so the family can take him to a psych ward. This, the narrator says, is the last time he’s ever with his entire family, and though he retrospectively thinks things could have gone differently, none of them are able to speak honestly with one another, so he ends up severing ties with them and embarking on a new life.