Chapter Analysis: We The Animals By Justin Torres

The passage I chose to close read from We The Animals by Justin Torres comes from the first paragraph of Chapter Four, entitled Seven. The author begins the scene like any other day yet the tone of the author’s writing is of worry. Torres’ tone affected my own mood. I tried to imagine how it would feel to be in the position that the narrator was in. Someone had abused his mother; in this case it was most likely her husband. Yet, the trauma of this chapter is portrayed as something that is nonchalant. Paps, the narrator's father, has just presented his wife’s current health status as something the narrator and his brothers should just brush off. As I read, the narrator would state that “[Paps] said [this], [Paps] told us [that], [Paps] had forbidden us to set foot in [Ma’s] bedroom…” (Torres 12). Paps had clear superiority over the whole family. From my close reading, I came to the conclusion that Paps was the one abusing Ma that is why he never allowed the children to be near her. The more she slept, the less she spoke, and the less “true” information was leaked to the

Why was Ma at home healing instead of at the hospital? Yes, their family is not the wealthiest in the world, but Ma was in bad condition. Observing her room there were pain pills, bloody tissues, and other things all over the room for days (Torres 12). It may have benefited her health if she was taken to a doctor. From my point of view, Paps purposely did not take her to the hospital or else he would suffer some type of consequence.

Meanwhile the children were naive, everything that their father would say and do they believed. The narrator and his brothers’ were filled with preconceived thoughts of their father and their family’s relationship dynamics. Their father’s abusive actions were not only towards their mother, but also directed towards them. As a child, this could have clogged up their definition of