“It’s the rules. They cage the animals at night! It’s the rules.”
At the Home of Angels orphanage after the narrator is unceremoniously dropped off by his mother with a promise to come back soon worth the price of a cup of coffee in 1930, a terrified and sad little boy is given a stuff animal by one of the nuns that he names Doggie. When he wakes up he is surprised to find Doggie missing and is informed by Mark about the rules. All the stuff animals are collected by the nuns and caged at night. It’s the rules. The narrator is about to learn all about strict rules and the necessity to rebel against some of them.
“We don't want to, Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals that are given to us we have to take care of. If we didn't cage them up in one place, we might lose them, they might get hurt or damaged. It's not the best thing, but it's the only way we have to take care of them."
This is the answer to the query posed to Sister Clair: why are the animals caged at night. So, that answers that; wonder no more about whether the title is merely some sort of metaphorical cage with symbolic animals. Of course, it is, but not within the young mind of a frightened boy orphaned boy facing a brand new kind of existence he's never know practically overnight. So, yes, the answer is literal to a degree, but also deeply metaphorical and thematically applied to more than the stuffed animals and those most typically needing to be caged.
I was a police officer in the late sixties when I adopted my daughter, Carolyn. That’s one less animal they’ll have to cage at night.
In the epilogue, the author sketches out a sort of American Graffiti-esque “where they are now” simple bio for some of the characters met along the way. Nearly the very last thing mentioned before the book end is this personal account of what happened to the writer after the events. The thematic backbone of caged animals has made the circuit from kinda sorta literal to complete symbolism. And the keys to the cage have been transferred for safe keeping.
“I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.”
The last words of the book before the epilogue are the narrator reconnecting with his beloved Sal, the bus driver. Overcome with emotions he tries to speak but nothing comes out. And so Sal, ever gentle, shows patience and understanding and waits. The words tumble out, Sal returns, then they tumble out again. One gets the distinct impression that a realistic accounting of events would have required a few extra pages of nothing written on it but “I love you.”
