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Sibling In We The Animals

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Today in America, an estimated 80% of the population has at least one sibling. While it is true that no two families are identical, the relationship between siblings plays a central role in their development and growth. Younger siblings for example, might be prone to mimic the actions of their older siblings, viewing their older siblings as faultless and heroic figures. On the other hand, older siblings are often viewed as authority figures and are seldom questioned. They might develop as friends with an inseparable bond or as bitter rivals seeking supremacy over the others. Regardless of the nature of their relationship, siblings that share a household are forced to interact with each other more than any other friend or family member. Sibling …show more content…

An example of this type of behavior occurs in the opening chapters of We The Animals. Specifically, in one scene the eldest brother begins speaking and the younger two appear to crane their necks and lean over in anticipation of their older brother’s wisdom. The narrator goes on to explain this behavior: “He was two years older than Joel and three years older than me. We waited for his judgment, for the other half of his sentence” (Torres 22). Here, our protagonist is cognizant of his brother’s stature and actively seeks to grasp his knowledge. Similarly, this pattern is also an earmark of the younger sibling in Junot Diaz’s Ysrael. In this story, the young narrator is forced to spend countless hours listening to his older brother recount all the details of his alleged sexual encounters. Of these occasions, the younger brother remarks, “I was too young to understand most of what he said but I listened to him anyway, in case there things might be useful in the future” (Diaz 6). Again, the reader gathers the indication that younger siblings feed off the experience of their older brothers and justifiably so; however, this behavior is not without …show more content…

This is the case in We The Animals as the narrator is often content watching or letting situations unfold while doing nothing to stop them. In one scene, as the narrator’s older brothers are fighting, he provides commentary saying “Manny was the Father, Joel the Son and I the Holy Spirit...and the Holy Spirit hovered and had to watch — there and not there — waiting for a new game” (Torres 25). While the narrator displays an awareness of his outsider status in the sibling dynamic by labeling himself as the more obscure and intangible of the trinity; one can also assume that years of exclusion have promoted a passive personality in which he does not attempt to break up the fight but is content with watching it. Another example transpires later on in the novel when the narrator addresses his brothers constant fighting by saying,“keeping the peace as best I could, which sometimes meant nothing more than falling down to my knees...letting them swing and cuss until they got tired”(Torres 90). The reader can see that even into adolescence after so many years, the narrator's passive attitude is still ingrained in his personality in that, even at the expense of his own personal safety, he chooses not to fight back or defend himself. Another important point to note here is throughout the novel his older brothers exclusively took

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