Animals In Literature
Animals are commonly found in the backdrop of works of literature, serving as props or setting or, on the rare occasion, as plot point.
Even rarer still are the occasions when an animal is the focus of a piece of literature, the main character and the crux more than the catalyst of a novel or short story’s plot. In modern times, an animal main character seems silly, childish; animals are only allowed to be main characters without question in picture books.
In the beginning of storytelling animals were almost always the main characters. Many folk tales use animals as the heroes and villains, the most famous including Anansi, the trickster-god spider of West African lore, and the various animals of Aesop’s Fables.
Perhaps in a time when people’s lives were more closely connected to wild animals, by chance or design, it was easier and more acceptable to give human characteristics to the animal, to cast the animal as the hero or villain and ignore humans entirely for the sake of a good story.
The virtue of using an animal as a character is that animals can be simplified in ways that human characters cannot. Make a villain unequivocally evil and readers are unlikely to be convinced.
We as readers are perhaps attracted to the perceived simplicity of animals and the comfort of that simplicity.
By Dina Reyes, Step 10
