The Eyes and the Impossible

Johannes’s character arc is shaped by the fight for freedom—a battle the protagonist has been fighting all his life. When he was a puppy, he chose to run away from humans so he wouldn’t become a pet like his siblings. He adamantly stands by this decision even though he has to struggle for survival in a way that he wouldn’t if he were a kept dog: “We were hungry but we were free. I still fend and I still scrounge and am still free, have always been free. No one feeds me. I am unkept and free” (13). As Johannes grows older, humans continue to pose a threat to his freedom. The introduction of the thief, Twisty, threatens Johannes’s freedom for the first time and gives him his only experience of captivity. Previously, Johannes “had been a dog, a free dog of limitless propulsive capacity and eyes without obstacle, and now [he] was a thing this man owned. [He] was the fulfillment of some desire he had” (55). In a key moment for the theme, Johannes fights his way to freedom and escapes back to the park with the help of his friends. The protagonist’s encounter with Twisty intensifies his lifelong conviction in “the glory of liberation” (68).

The Bison Freedom Gambit allows Johannes to express his heightened commitment to liberty while ignoring his own yearning for freedom. As the Eyes, his sense of duty to the park prevents him from prioritizing his own liberty, so he projects that desire onto the bison instead: “The planning kept my mind off my own troubles, and gave me the same sense of mission Bertrand spoke of” (127). In the end, the bison’s decision to stay on the island allows Johannes the freedom to realize his true desires and leave himself. Eggers foreshadows Johannes’s decision in his fascination with Helene’s stories about the mainland: “By her telling, there would be all the land I could ever want—I could run for a million days and never find a boundary” (238). Johannes’s fight for freedom ultimately culminates in his voyage to the mainland.

Johannes also gains freedom in the form of self-acceptance. He initially struggles with the revelation that he is half-coyote because of humans’ negative perceptions of coyotes as “a mangy and troublesome and even dangerous kind” (152). Humans’ negative view of coyotes poses a real threat to Johannes’s freedom. The Parks People and Control-the-Animals People become increasingly determined to catch him, and even seal off his home. Despite these negative perceptions and experiences, Johannes eventually embraces his identity. Eggers’s novel suggests that, as a coyote-dog, freedom is even more deeply ingrained in Johannes than he realized; he is a wild animal who is not meant to be kept. In addition, Johannes’s unsurpassed swiftness comes from his coyote father, and this speed helps him save Bertrand:

I ran to the ocean faster than I’d ever run before. And now that I knew I was half-coyote, and that my coyote blood gave me my speed, and perhaps my eyes, too, I embraced it all and ran with the power of all dogs, all coyotes, every one of them who had come before me (241).

Eggers uses running, a motif of the fight for freedom, to demonstrate Johannes’s newfound ability to embrace his whole identity and be his fullest self. Through Johannes’s arc, Eggers’s novel explores a nuanced understanding of freedom as both physical liberation and radical self-acceptance.