42 pages • 1 hour read
Andre AlexisFifteen Dogs
Andre AlexisFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Poetry
Prince writes 15 poems, which appear throughout the text. Alexis explains in an author’s note that he crafted Prince’s poems in an experimental genre that French poet Francois Caradec invented to have meaning for both dogs and humans. Within Fifteen Dogs, the poems serve a symbolic function: They represent language that can bridge the dog-human divide.
Prince’s first poem embeds the name Majnoun: “The grass is wet on the hill. The sky has no end. / For the dog who waits for his mistress, / Madge, noon comes again” (28). The other dogs begin growling and barking, thinking that one of their mistresses is approaching, but Majnoun, whose name is audible in the poem (“Madge, noon”), feels moved and asks for another poem.
The poems also typically reflect the dogs’ characters or behaviors. For example, after Atticus purges the pack of dogs who will not live by his rules, he recalls a poem Prince once told: “In the sunny world, with its small / things moving too fast, / I shy away from the light / and in the attic cuss the dark” (93). The poem Atticus recalls features his name (“attic cuss”) and symbolically represents Atticus’s rejection of the gift of human intelligence (“light”).
Alienation
Alienation is a recurring motif in Fifteen Dogs. When the pack first forms, the dogs who have received human intelligence face repeated attacks by other dogs who recognize them as “other” and cannot determine whether they are a threat, forcing them to retreat to a more secluded area. Exiled from the dog community, each of the dogs gifted with human intelligence experiences existential angst, though they handle it in markedly different ways.
Atticus never accepts his new state and resists it to the end of his life, resorting to extreme acts to convince himself that he is still a proper dog. These include the murders of Bella, Athena, Bobbie, Dougie, and Max, as well as the attempted murder of Majnoun. The harder he tries to maintain a “traditional” dog pack, the further he strays from his dog instincts, and the pack falls apart. Athena and Bella accept what they have become and focus on their friendship, though this alienates them from and puts them at odds with the dogs who have rejected their gift. Majnoun develops a deep emotional bond with a human, while Prince, who distrusts humans, generally avoids them until he has no choice. Though Benjy regrets his alienation, he accepts it and seeks to improve his circumstances, but the strong dog instincts that he has retained are incompatible with his human intelligence, which causes him to misread situations. Only when the dogs become vulnerable do they reconnect with dog kind, which both Majnoun and Prince experience at the end of their lives.
Place Markers
Fifteen Dogs is set in Alexis’s home city of Toronto, and he includes two maps marked with each of the places where the gods, humans, and dogs live and visit. This allows readers to trace the journeys each takes, from the pub where Apollo and Hermes make their bet, to the veterinary clinic they pass, to High Park, where the dogs establish their den, to Prince’s final home.
Providing a physical image that locates the dogs in a particular space repeatedly draws attention to the importance of physical, sensory experiences and how they shape point of view. As with the poems, the maps and the repeated references to place in the novel attempt to bridge the perspective gap between humans’ intellectual and emotional data gathering and assessment, and dogs’ reliance on the sensory.
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