When the Narrator Is a Very Good Boy

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.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.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.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.”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.”Read: Netflix captures the doom and dream of Watership DownIn 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 explains, telepathic: Their common language takes the form of “dark shapes” that materialize “in a space between our eyes, shapes we could translate.” To struggle with silence is a uniquely human condition; the animal kingdom abides in it, until there is reason to sound out.For all its compactness, Etna has the shape of an epic. The story draws explicit comparisons to Homer’s The Odyssey: Its titular character tries to return to the farm where he was born after surviving a ravaging war. (The book also features a minor Greek character named Achilles.) An animal story set in motion by the basest human impulses—though also distinguished by some of our best—the novel is tied deeply into both ancient literary tradition and tragically perennial concerns.Etna prompts readers to imagine an experience of the world unbound from human social convention, but it is no less interested in the slippery distinctions between human and nonhuman desires for belonging, intimacy, and home. Yoon drew extensively on these themes in his earlier works—most recently in the novel Run Me to Earth and the Story Prize–winning collection The Hive and the Honey—and his oeuvre depicts war’s psychological and material calamities. He understands that one of the most violent disruptions a living being can sustain is sudden estrangement from their environment. And yet, in Yoon’s hands, a character’s suffering never overwhelms their capacity for tenderness. The author always insists on the enduring humanity of his displaced subject—even when they aren’t human.Nevertheless, Etna stands out among Yoon’s work; it is, first of all, a dog’s tale. How does Etna—who keeps close company with humans but is by definition marginalized by them—hold on to himself in the face of rank, incoherent brutalities? Perhaps he must become a storyteller. “I was born near water,” he begins, in the simple declarative assertion so common to famous literary beginnings. And then, also like his bipedal narrative forebears (David Copperfield, for instance), he quickly proceeds toward reflective ambivalence: “I would never learn what the farm was intending to do with me. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe I was supposed to grow old there.” Like any living creature, Etna can only speculate about the other shapes that his life might have taken. But Yoon is careful, with his characteristically spare, visceral imagery, to establish Etna’s early happiness. “Every day there was sand floating in daylight and the salt on our tongues. The sea wind over grass,” the dog says, in a manner both frank and wistful. He recalls his mother, steady as a planet, “her face looming over us in the sky, the tall triangles of her ears pocketing the smell of the coast.”Yoon’s fiction focuses primarily on Asian communities in Korea and Laos, and across the diaspora. Etna is set in a small, unnamed country, which makes sense; nationalism and border politics are alien to dogs. Invading forces threaten the country when Etna is still a puppy, and the looming war marks the abrupt end of his idyllic puppyhood. One frightening day, he is whisked away from the farm and sent to combat training by a military doctor named Soojin, who can communicate with certain “special” dogs by reading their minds. She is the one to bestow him with his name: All dogs, Etna explains, “had private names” that “our mothers called us by, but we never shared those.” The name Etna, volcanic in its association, aligns with the new life being imposed upon him. “You’re now war dogs, my darling,” Soojin tells Etna, as she drives him and his canine partner, Fuji, to a drop-off location. “You’ll make new friends and you’re going to work hard and save a lot of lives.”Read: How an epic and violent family history fuels fictionEtna is distressed by this turn of events—he wants to return to the farm—but he does not resist or try to flee. The novel elides any ham-fisted meditations on the dominant species’ impositions; although Yoon is clearly fond of his narrator, he nimbly avoids the tendency of many animal tales to traffic in neat parables or didactic moralism. (As a lifelong reader of Black Beauty, I freely admit that Sewell, like so many Victorian writers, does not manage this as well.) Nonetheless, Etna and his fellow creatures understand their subordinate position in the hierarchy. He and Fuji are assigned to a unit of American soldiers sent to bolster this country’s self-defense. They undergo an education in ruthlessness and become, as Soojin predicts, skilled war dogs. “I learned to be good at it,” Etna later tells another dog. “All of it.” He is not altogether regretful of this knowledge, for his adeptness brings certain pleasures: for instance, distilling the “strong clear line that was a single smell” from a landscape’s sensory chaos, even if it leads to explosives or human remains.But in the squall of war, Etna’s talents also beget inexorable demands. He is injured six times; gradually, his body accumulates “stripes of scars like old worms” that render him unrecognizable to himself. He loses his friends, both canine and human. And although Etna’s narrative voice—vulnerable, curious, endearingly direct—inclines the reader to envision the pluckiest good boy, humanity’s violence deprives him of a gentle youth. Like any soldier, Etna learns to kill on command.The war lasts four cataclysmal years. Etna’s country prevails but is demolished in the process; its people and animals are left wrecked, hungry, and homeless. One night, Etna rests near two of the surviving soldiers in his unit, eavesdropping on their boozy conversation, during which one contemplates shooting Etna as a gesture of mercy. “None of us were right in the head after what we saw and did and what our bodies and souls endured,” the soldier reasons. The dog takes no offense at this suggestion; these are “young humans,” he explains, who “had been good to their dogs” until they were lost in battle. “Everyone wanted to go home. And to go away.”Etna, like so many dogs, is an empathetic creature, and the grace he extends to these soldiers facilitates the epiphany that propels the rest of the story: He, too, wants to return home, and so he departs on a harrowing journey. In the midst of it, Etna befriends a small, eager canine, Semeru, who knows Soojin and helps Etna reunite with her. Semeru’s introduction as the sidekick brings a touch of comedic respite; he has two interspecies exchanges, with a cat and with a donkey, that made me laugh out loud. I suspect that some readers will regard his dynamic with Etna as cliché; after all, it is difficult to render an affectionate animal relationship without a touch of bathos. But Semeru provides a crucial intimacy for Etna, whose experience of the war has been one of agonizing isolation.This is, at times, a wrenching novel, strewn with broken bodies, but its atrocities never overwhelm its faith in creaturely communion, and in grief and longing that clarify, rather than obscure, one’s desires and selfhood. “What do you know about creatures?” Etna wonders to himself, about a group of missionaries he encounters on his journey. He might well ask his readers the same thing. In real life, our dogs cannot tell us what they make of the disasters we humans have wrought, nor can their fidelity absolve us. But we can see by their perked ears and wagging tails that they are waiting to see what happens next.​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.