Unreliability and the Animal Narrator in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs

Anja Höing

doi:10.3390/h6010006

Abstract

Richard Adams’s talking animal story The Plague Dogs (1978), with its deeply genre-atypical mode of narration, offers a multiplicity of avenues to explore the literary animal as animal. The story draws much of its power from the psychological complexity and related unreliability of both canine narrators, two research lab escapees gone feral. Both the terrier Snitter and the black mongrel Rowf are mentally ill and experience a highly subjective, part-fantastic world. In episodes of zero focalization, a sarcastic voice comments on the plot from the off, aggressively attacking a thoroughly anthropocentric superstructure the protagonists themselves are oblivious of, and presenting all that is normally constructed as “rational” in the implied reader’s world as a carnivalesque farce. Combining these equally unreliable narratives, The Plague Dogs creates a unique mixture of what Phelan (2007) calls “estranging” and “bonding” unreliability and brings to light the devastating consequences of anthropocentrism. The Plague Dogs not only defamiliarizes a genre usually committed to conventional means of storytelling, but the dominant Western conception of the status of animals in the world, showing that once we start to read the animal as animal, this sets into motion an avalanche of other concepts in need of re-reading, among them the very ones making up the fundamental pillars of Western societies’ anthropocentric self-conception.

Highlights

In 1972, British author Richard Adams made top of the bestseller lists with his talking animal story Watership Down (1972), a light-hearted rabbit Odyssey that has since become a classic
The Plague Dogs defamiliarizes a genre usually committed to conventional means of storytelling, but the dominant Western conception of the status of animals in the world, showing that once we start to read the animal as animal, this sets into motion an avalanche of other concepts in need of re-reading, among them the very ones making up the fundamental pillars of Western societies’ anthropocentric self-conception
The Plague Dogs finds mention in articles primarily dealing with resistance to animal experimentation, especially ones published shortly after Adams’s book

Summary

Introduction

In 1972, British author Richard Adams made top of the bestseller lists with his talking animal story Watership Down (1972), a light-hearted rabbit Odyssey that has since become a classic His second talking animal story, The Plague Dogs (1978) [1], in contrast, attracted little public notice and even less scholarly attention1 —despite the fact that Adams himself considers it his best novel [6]. A media hype blossoms around a newspaper’s fabricated allegation that the research station escapees are infected with bubonic plague This triggers a snowball effect of scientists fighting to shift the blame, politicians struggling to keep face, and newspapers trying to raise circulation by further blowing up the story, which ends in a witch hunt for the innocent dogs. Anthropocentric self-conception and the according subjugation and exploitation of other species

Adapting a Non-Human Perspective toward Unreliability

Narrating without a Safety Net: A Canine Pincher Martin

Undermining Anthropocentric Normativity

The Reader Shipwrecked