Literary animals…
Writing about the children’s book Valiant, Dog of the Timberline in a recent post about Westerns, reminded me that, even in a story not about animals, critters can play an important role. Mice to mongooses (mongeese?), swans to elephants, pigs, cats, and dogs—literary animals have filled the pages of world literature. Whether anthropomorphized or not, animals can actually become main characters that bring life to a story. Here’s a quiz. Match up the following names with the animals I just listed: Leda, Napoleon, Horton, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, Argos, Stuart Little, Mrs. Norris. Then find the famous authors that wrote about that named animal.
Dean Koontz, for example, generally has a dog playing an important role. Often the dog is a golden retriever, probably modeled after his own. The old veteran Walter in my thriller The Midas Bomb is buddies with a mongrel named Crackles—he plays only a secondary role. In these examples, we see one function of the animal pet: to make a human character seem even more human. Human beings have had pets for centuries—the bond between a character and his or her animal can explain many things about the character, simplifying the job of writing.
Many dogs are just big bundles of unselfish love, but they might seem too needy for some readers. Cats are more independent and often irascible characters. The first victim’s cat plays a small role in my sci-fi novel Soldiers of God, but in Robert Heinlein’s The Door into Summer, the cat Petronius the Arbiter, otherwise known as Pete, is a principal character. Then there’s Poe’s famous “The Black Cat,” surely the most famous example of the animal kingdom’s revenge on abusing human beings.
Up to now, I’ve written about normal cats and dogs, but writers can go beyond that. In Vernor Vinge’s Fire Upon the Deep, we have essentially an elaborate space opera where the Tines, tribes of alien dogs, play a central role. (I consider Vinge’s novel to be more fantasy than fiction—you may enjoy his Nazi butterflies—the science is more magic than science, including a non-constant speed-of-light). And who can forget the Kzin warriors that are mortal enemies to Humans in the Man-Kzin Wars series initiated by Larry Niven? They are hardly your average housecats!
While readers have fun with all these animal characters, writers probably have more fun creating them. Even though Orwell’s themes are serious in Animal Farm, making the bad guys pigs undoubtedly tickled his fancy. Pigs can play dual roles, it seems, from villains to saints. In the sequels to Ender’s Game, Card uses an alien pig species’ life cycle to probe the meaning of existence.
Children’s lit abounds with talking animals, of course. The best known cat is the Cheshire Cat and the best know rabbit is the White Rabbit. The animals in Alice are essential to the story and often lighten up some rather serious writing. Orwell’s dark allegory Animal Farm, a lesson about the dangers of totalitarianism and cults of personality, is a dark contrast to Carroll’s light-hearted romp through a child’s imaginary world. However, both these authors discuss universal truths in the abstract setting of make-believe, distilling and simplifying their message like a fine Irish whiskey.
Should you use animals in your stories? They can certainly add important elements, but caveat emptor: be careful developing your animal characters. A true lover of your type of animal character will be looking for things that are out-of-character. For example, every lover of cats will know if you are also a cat lover when you write about them. Same for dogs.
Nevertheless, animal characters are easier to write into a story than female characters, at least for male writers. In a very old post, I wrote about the difficulty of writing about female characters—female writers do not seem to have the same problems with male characters. The problems are often associated with the fact that Human characters are complicated by their very humanity, where an animal character can have as many human characteristics as the author wants.
In adding any character to your story, the character and the story have to mesh. Moreover, the character must be necessary to the story—make sure you need that character, especially in short stories where less is often better than more. Make your animal characters entertaining and believable. Moreover, always remember that it is your reader that takes that character and brings it to life in their own imagination—you only provide a little stimulus.
