The Dying Animal

Abstract

Each of the novels in this chapter positions the death of the animal as fundamentally transformative of both self and text, using different formal strategies to depict, or react to, the death of the animal. Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing and Yannick Murphy’s The Call both use unique narrative structures in their accounts of the relation between human and nonhuman death and trauma in farm and agricultural settings. Keith Ridgway’s Animals and Sara Baume’s A Line Made by Walking depict the death of small wild animals in ways that disrupt both stable narrative perspective and the relation between word and image. Animal death, in each text, changes not only the stories the protagonists tell about animals but also the ones they tell about themselves.