A Disquieting Tranquility: The Struggle for Affection in 'We the Animals' Anonymous College

Justin Torres’s We the Animals features an unnamed narrator who struggles for love and recognition from his family members, only to fail in the end when his taboo sexual identity creates a rift too vast to mend. In particular, the narrator tries to earn recognition and affection from his emotionally absentee mother, “Ma,” until his moment of surrender, in which he no longer even speaks to her. Though the detached style of narration during the narrator’s “surrender” with Ma appears superficially more peaceful than the viscerally charged language of their earlier struggles, the disquietude of such tranquility suggests the superiority of the family’s dysfunctional love to an absence of love altogether.

The narrator’s initial struggle to earn Ma’s affection is wrapped up in volatile and charged language vis-à-vis imagery of the sublime. The scene between mother and son on the narrator’s seventh birthday constitutes a battle for acknowledgement, as Ma refuses to recognize her son’s real age. When the narrator, as if in battle, wraps himself in the curtain for protection, the “light” is a device to express an overwhelming rush of feeling; it does not hit the narrator’s eyes immediately, but is “reflected back and forth” (16). This...