Confronting Childhood through Collective Identity Olivia F. Vega 12th Grade

In Justin Torres’s poetic novel, We the Animals, an unnamed narrator chronicles his childhood experiences and social maturation through vignettes. Torres portrays the close relationship the narrator holds with his two older brothers’, Manny and Joel, mirrored against the dysfunctional and often tumultuous and abusive marriage of their parents, referred to as Ma and Paps. Torres characterizes the narrator’s formative years of adolescence through poignant experiences that reflect his family’s low-income status and cycle of harmful perpetuation of masculine gender roles. In particular, Torres emphasizes the significance of the collective identity shared by the three brothers. The narrator and his siblings are connected through their biracial heritage and struggle to understand the duality of Paps’s loving behavior and violent actions. Through the narrator’s eventual deterioration of the relationship with his three brothers indicated with a shift in narrative voice, the narrator comes to understand that the expression of his sexuality and authentic identity require his separation from a collective and familiar shared identity, rooted in childhood experience and an inhibited ability to express personal desires.

The ways in which the...