Why Animal Narrators Are All the Rage - The Atlantic

The first animal narrator to make an impression on me was an amiable mutt named Harold, who, with remarkable lucidity, recounts the peculiar events of James and Deborah Howes’s 1979 novel, Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery. The book, written for and beloved by children, boasts a winning premise by any metric: A fanged rabbit’s benign vampiric qualities inspire a series of animal hijinks that endanger Bunnicula and propel Harold to acts of interspecies mercy.<br>Interrogations into rabbit vampirism aside, Bunnicula compelled me most because its narrator is a dog—one who, despite his aptitude for writing, cannot otherwise communicate with people. This textual sleight of hand ignited my fascination with a narrator’s uncanny power to describe reality as they experience it. Its impossibility (if only dogs could write books!) is what made this literary conceit so captivating—the kind of imaginative leap that most fiction makes in one way or another, although it is not always so conspicuous or playful.<br>Every novel requires some suspension of disbelief, but a book narrated by an animal—a surprisingly common subgenre—raises unique questions about representation. We can safely assume that a human author is more qualified to render the emotional landscape of a fellow human than they are of a dog or a horse or a mountain lion. Yet what the best of these novels lose in verisimilitude, they gain in creative vision. Anna Sewell’s 1877 novel, Black Beauty, prevails as one of the standard-bearers; it adopts the first-person perspective of the titular horse to encourage more humane treatment of his species. Virginia Woolf’s motivations were more recreational when she published Flush: A Biography in 1933. Woolf, who desired a palate cleanser after finishing her experimental novel The Waves, focused her energies on the life story of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. Richard Adam’s 1972 novel, Watership Down, imagines an anthropomorphized society of rabbits with their own species-centered cosmology, who must brave the predatory wilds to make a new home.<br>Etna: A Novel<br>By Yoon, Paul

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Most creature-oriented stories—no matter how comedic or frolicsome—will gesture, either explicitly or subtly, at the hazards inherent to animal lives. (Flush, for instance, was briefly kidnapped and returned for a ransom.) But in recent years, writers and filmmakers have magnified the peril that their nonhuman subjects navigate, laying bare the human-made disasters that now jeopardize their lives. The Academy Award–winning 2024 film Flow dramatizes the struggles of a tenacious black cat in a flooded world where all human life has vanished; the Polish movie EO tells the story of a donkey subject to agonizing abuses and fleeting joys, and culminates in a slaughterhouse scene that indicts factory farming. Among recent animal-narrated novels, the best may be Open Throat. Henry Hoke’s savage 2023 masterpiece is narrated by a queer, ravenous mountain lion who lives in the arid underbrush beneath Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign, near an unhoused encampment that he dutifully protects. Midway through the novel, a malicious hiker sets fire to the camp, forcing the mountain lion to seek refuge in the urban sprawl he refers to as “ellay.”<br>Etna, Paul Yoon’s third novel, is the latest addition to the modern animal-in-peril narrative: the story of a military dog named Etna who is snatched up and discarded in the course of a human war. Like Open Throat, Etna excels as a keenly wrought hypothesis about not only how its chosen creature would perceive the world and its dangers, but also how those perceptions can be adapted to fiction. Although Etna tempers the exacting moral judgments at the core of Open Throat with a plot that bends toward empathy, Yoon’s critiques of humanity are just as pointed as Hoke’s, and they emerge from a similarly textured philosophy that acknowledges the fraught business of living, whether one walks on two feet or four. Like all weary, uprooted creatures, Etna longs for home, but unlike so many of the humans who commandeer his world, he possesses far less agency when it comes to finding his way back there. And yet there are compensations. Etna may lack the privilege of human sovereignty and the benefits of advanced intelligence, but he is free of the hubristic delusions that underwrite so much human-produced wreckage. As he observes to a fellow dog, “There’s no other place but here.”<br>Read: Netflix captures the doom and dream of Watership Down<br>In both Open Throat and Etna, brevity is central to characterizing animal consciousness. (Neither novel reaches 200 pages.) Both Yoon and Hoke also structure their works with staccato-like page breaks—a decision that cleverly evokes spans of creaturely silence. Etna is a sociable fellow, but his conversations with other animals never indulge in pleasantries. Nonhuman discourse is laconic yet earnest—and, as his narration...