The Rabbit Hutch

Dead animals are a prominent motif in the novel. While we learn that live vermin are abundant in Vacca Vale—“the rat population surpassing the human population by an estimated 30,000” which symbolizes the town’s decay and the way it has been orphaned by the authorities (40)—most of the animals at the Rabbit Hutch are dead or on the brink of sacrifice. Without any visible outside help, the residents feel they need to deal with the vermin problem themselves, as overwhelmed young mother Hope traps the mice in her apartment but then flings them over the balcony. Her casual wonder but ultimate carelessness about where the mice land indicates that she has abdicated her communal responsibility, just as the authorities abandoned her town.

Then, Blandine uses small animal skeletons in her protest and deposits them along with voodoo dolls, dirt, and fake blood at the Vacca Vale development project’s dinner at the country club. While the developers sit in their insulated environment and make decisions about a nature they are disconnected from, Blandine hopes to remind them of the messy, natural components of the Chastity Valley they will be interfering with. While the mud and fake blood reflect the mess they will make and the voodoo dolls imply a curse, the real animal skeletons are meant to unsettle their enjoyment of a meat-laden dinner and evoke a sense of the death that their actions will bring.

Finally, we encounter dead animals in the sacrifices perpetrated by the boys in Apartment C4. This begins with the half-dead fish Jack finds in the Vacca Vale river and extends to the small creatures the boys sacrifice in their home to compete with each other in Blandine’s name. Importantly, the boys do not enjoy the acts of sacrifice themselves and perform endurance tests to avoid being the ones who perform the sacrifices. As Todd is the weakest, he is the one who is often coerced into doing the killing. Jack tries to desensitize himself to the violence, stating that the rabbits they mainly chose were “a dime a dozen in this town” (271). However, the fact that rabbits are “silent creatures […] until you try to kill one” and then “they scream like death itself”, indicates that each rabbit values its life and desires to live (271). Indeed, the boys sacrifice their own peace of mind as they are haunted by the dying rabbits’ sounds, which “never gets out” of them (271). As Blandine later charges, the boys do not know who they are and therefore perform these ritual killings because they allow them to act out masculine gender roles—violent and competitive.