We Love You, Bunny

The shift to Aerius’s point of view is marked by a stylistic transition and speaks to Authorial Control and Agency Over Narratives. While the Bunnies narrate in a style reflecting how some contemporary young women might speak, Aerius’s diction and style are shaped by the cultural influences he consumed during his time in the attic. His direct address to the reader, occasionally flowery diction, and practice of capitalization for emphasis all borrow from literary conventions more common in 18th- and 19th-century literature. At the same time, he also uses happy and sad face emojis liberally to convey emotion, reflecting a playful hybridity of style.

Aerius’s opportunity to narrate provides readers with direct access to his thoughts and emotions since he transparently reveals his inner world. Aerius’s narrative is initially retrospective: He begins writing it once he has moved into Ursula’s cottage at the end of November, after the dinner with the poets and the death of Leonard. Thus, when he is describing events from Halloween and the earlier part of November, he is looking back and describing his memories of these events.

Aerius’s narrative confirms that he was unhappy during the time he was held captive by the Bunnies: He explains that Death “was a Risk I was willing to take, such had been the Pain of my Attic Times” (180) and he refers to the Bunnies as “Goldy Cut, Murder Fairy, and Insatiable” (180) as well as nicknaming Elsinore “the Mind Witch” (180). These nicknames reveal Aerius’s disdain and revulsion toward the Bunnies, but also offer an early example of how he utilizes language to achieve agency. Even when he lacks all other power, Aerius can express agency and creativity by renaming his captors. Doing so also shifts the Bunnies—who, up until this point, have been the protagonists—into minor characters in a story now centered on Aerius. The novel’s narrative structure and allusions to Samantha’s novel explore the idea that individuals always perceive themselves as the main character in their own story, with shifts in perspective changing the frame through which events are revealed.

When Aerius flees, he takes the axe, a razor blade, and Pony. Pony comes to fulfill the role of a sidekick on Aerius’s quest and reveals his desperate longing for a friend. Since Aerius is so lonely and isolated, he bonds with a plastic toy pony and imagines Pony speaking to him. This quirk reveals that Aerius is childlike in many ways, including his limited understanding of the world around him; the Bunnies are distracted by his alluring and adult appearance, and neglect to provide the care and nurturing he requires. The subplot of Aerius’s friendship with Pony also alludes to how the novel explores themes of what it means to be “real”: Aerius struggles to understand whether Pony is real or not because these categories confuse him, just as he is confused by the gap between the literal and the figurative. Aerius’s earnestness and naivety contribute to satirizing the world of the college campus, where most other people he meets are pretentious and affected.

When Aerius escapes, it is Halloween night, a setting associated with chaos, mayhem, and confusion between reality and artifice generated by costumes. Aerius’s strange appearance and behavior go unquestioned because the other students assume he is in character. Aerius is literal and straightforward in almost everything he says, but everyone assumes he is joking, using metaphors, or doing performance art. Aerius’s difficulty with distinguishing the literal from sarcasm, allusions, or metaphors comes to the fore when he commits his first murder at the Halloween party. He kills Tyler after he mistakenly interprets Tyler as being named “Allan” when Tyler and another student are discussing how Tyler is dressed up as Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe is known as a Gothic writer whose works, such as The Tell-Tale Heart and The Raven, allude to themes of murder, secrets, and guilt. The allusion is appropriately dark and sinister for a Halloween setting and for Aerius’s first murder. Whenever Aerius encounters someone whom he believes to be named Allan, he feels a compulsion to kill them with the axe. The bloody splatters that result from his killing Tyler echo the spurting blood when the rabbits explode during the creation rituals, implying that birth and death (and destruction and creation) are linked within the world of the novel.

While Aerius quickly proves himself to be capable of gruesome violence, he is also capable of love, introducing his experience of The Pain of Unrequited Desire. Aerius encounters Jonah, who is dressed as Frankenstein’s monster (deepening the allusion between the two texts). As the two young men spend time together, Aerius quickly becomes infatuated, commenting, “when I looked at Jonah walking beside me in the Dark, smoking and smiling at the Moon […] [Love] was precisely the Word that came skipping into my Heart” (207). Aerius’s feelings for Jonah suggest that a longing for companionship and love is a universal human need; he is also able to experience these feelings even though he has had negative experiences with the rapacious forms of “love” the Bunnies showed toward him.

As Aerius has his first taste of love and longing, he reflects how “tis an Ouch to love what doesn’t love you, you see,” adding that it, “is something I did not yet fully understand. Now I know tis a deeper Ouch than any Razor Swipe” (207). By claiming his freedom, Aerius enters more fully into experiencing what it means to be human, but this means he must taste pain as well as pleasure. He becomes subject to desire, jealousy, and fearfulness. When he tries to cling to Jonah the morning after they sleep together, Aerius notes, “I knew I was behaving ridiculously, quite like my Keepers” (235). Aerius’s narrative humanizes him but also creates sympathy for the Bunnies by showing that trying to control and possess what one loves can become an easy downfall if one is not mindful of the agency and personhood of the other person one loves.