We Love You, Bunny

Aerius is introduced as a strange but beguiling character who immediately enchants the Bunnies and adds another dimension to the theme of Authorial Control and Agency Over Narratives. Aerius represents art and the output of the creative process: He synthesizes the Bunnies’ innermost longings, fears, and aspirations.

The immediate obsessive fascination they feel toward him reflects the pride and protectiveness that writers (and other artists) can feel toward their work, but also the dangers of self-centeredness and solipsism. The Bunnies are infatuated with Aerius because of how he reflects them back to themselves. Despite the collective creation process, the Bunnies also immediately begin to covet individual access to Aerius, and each wants to claim him as her own. Despite Aerius’s striking beauty, he also signals an immediate capacity for violence. Aerius has absorbed the anger and frustration the Bunnies felt toward Allan during his creation process and now feels a compulsion to “Kill Allan, Kill Allan, Kill Allan” (131), which will drive a violent and darkly funny “comedy of errors” plot through the remainder of the novel.

Aerius’s violent compulsion reflects how children or uncritical audiences can misinterpret messages from their environment. The Bunnies had used the phrase “kill Allan” to express their emotions, but had no intention of actually following through with physical violence. As Elsinore tries to explain to Aerius, “No, no. Not literally kill” (131, emphasis added). Within the context of a group of writers and an MFA program, the gap between figurative language and literal meaning reveals the danger and power of words. Aerius is manifested out of the Bunnies’ words, but also symbolizes how they cannot control how others will interpret those words, gesturing toward the gap between authorial intent and an audience’s understanding.

The introduction of Aerius highlights the Bunnies’ status as unreliable narrators. Elsinore’s account of getting Aerius into the attic reflects the Bunnies’ refusal to see themselves as villains: “Aerius came with us to the house quite willingly […] Okay, perhaps not entirely willingly […] and so, yes, in the end, we had to drag him a little. Just those final few feet” (136). Elsinore’s account minimizes the role of physical force and coercion in what is effectively an abduction and forced captivity (which parallels the way they have also treated Samantha in the present-day narration). The description of the time that Aerius spends in the attic makes it clear that he is unhappy there, often regarding his captors with “a kind of visceral animal alarm, a bewildered fear-hate” (154).

This section also introduces the theme of The Pain of Unrequited Desire, since the Bunnies long for Aerius to reciprocate the love and lust they feel toward him. The Bunnies are presented as characters who fundamentally lack self-awareness about their actions, but they can also evoke sympathy in their futile efforts to “to make something of ourselves and our lives. To make something fucking beautiful that loves us” (155). The passive captivity of Aerius and the Bunnies’ clear sexual desire for him inverts gendered stereotypes around power, consent, and agency: While the Bunnies never force themselves on Aerius, they do attempt to coerce him into engaging in various kinds of sexualized and romantic behavior while he lacks power, which heightens the sense of violence and domination.

The Bunnies’ taking on of the role of educators toward Aerius further develops the theme of Disappointment Over Failed Role Models. Aerius’s creation story alludes to Frankenstein: Like the Creature in Mary Shelley’s novel, he is ignorant, helpless, and has the capacity for violence but no innate malevolence. The Bunnies are, therefore, aligned with Victor Frankenstein as arrogant and reckless creators who fail to understand the responsibility that should accompany creativity. This allusion is made explicit when Elsinore comments that “[Aerius’s] favorite film was Frankenstein, understandably so” (156).

In Shelley’s novel, the Creature comes to learn about human history and culture by reading several pivotal works of literature, including Paradise Lost and The Sorrows of Young Werther. Likewise, the Bunnies decide to attempt to civilize and educate Aerius by giving him cultural artifacts in the form of literature, music, and film. They refer to this process as “he needs revision” (151, emphasis added), deepening the symbolism of Aerius as a creative output. A writer would typically revise a first draft, making edits and changes, and they believe they can do the same for Aerius: “[W]e love […] Nurture. Teach as only we can. We do the difficult but ultimately very rewarding work of making him better” (152). Ironically, they don’t understand why Aerius is so resistant to their efforts to educate and mold him, even though they have been infuriated by Allan’s attempts to engage in a similar process while teaching them and trying to make them better writers.

The Bunnies fail Aerius because they selfishly only give him their favorite things and because they attempt to keep him in a child-like, dependent state. They do not want him to ever cultivate his own agency or taste. Aerius rebels against his captors because of his innate longing for freedom; he seizes the opportunity to run away, which confirms that he was unhappy with his life in the attic.

Aerius’s escape moves the narrative into its third stage, a story-within-a story, featuring the manuscript that he wrote documenting his own story. This structure is also utilized in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which the Creature has the opportunity to speak directly and recount his experiences to Frankenstein (albeit then relayed to the reader through Victor Frankenstein’s recollection of their conversations). In both novels, the narrative structure is important logistically, as it allows readers access to events that occur while Aerius and the Creature are separated from their creators, and thematically, since it allows a monstrous individual to gain sympathy by revealing his interiority. Once he escapes, Aerius claims his freedom, and that freedom also grants him the ability to tell his own story.