The Dogs of Literature

When you are reading a book or watching a film and a dog appears, steel yourself. It is most likely about to be the most devastating shorthand for human despair.

As I prepare to welcome another puppy into my home - a creature scientifically engineered to radiate unshakeable optimism - I’ve been reflecting on the literary lives (and, tragically often, deaths) of their fictional counterparts.

It doesn’t matter if you are working your way through a GCSE text or reading round the hotel pool; dogs are used as narrative scalpels, slicing straight to the heart of our emotions.  In Of Mice and Men, Candy’s old dog is one of the earliest literary gut punches students encounter.  Steinbeck, never one for subtlety when it comes to suffering, crafts this arthritic mutt into a perfect symbol of obsolescence, companionship, and the crushing realities of the American Dream.  That moment - when Carlson leads the dog out and the fatal shot rings - is often a student’s first encounter with literature’s ability to wound.  It’s a masterclass in economical storytelling: if you want to foreshadow a character’s fate, give them a dog, then take it away.

Literature set texts abound with similar canine tragedies.  To Kill a Mockingbird (a novel not exactly short on moral lessons) features Atticus Finch’s execution of a rabid dog, a moment heavy with symbolism about justice and societal rot.  Orwell, a man constitutionally incapable of letting anyone (man or beast) escape unscathed, gives us Jessie and Bluebell in Animal Farm, their puppies co-opted into Napoleon’s terrifying secret police.  Dickens, unsurprisingly, throws dogs into his swirling misery vortex: Oliver Twist’s Bill Sikes has Bull’s-eye, a violent extension of his own brutality, whose death (like his master’s) is both grim and inevitable.

Yet, now and then, a literary dog beats the odds and gets to be - well - a dog.  Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, where Six-Thirty, the profoundly intelligent rescue dog, provides a rare but utterly effective example of canine narration done right - his perspective both heart-wrenching and quietly revolutionary in a novel brimming with sharp social commentary.  I had to skim-read to check if the dog survives, but when I realised it was going to be okay, there was something refreshing in a dog’s narrative purpose being something other than impending doom.  

This, I suspect, is what draws us to them in life as much as in fiction: the refusal to be anything other than joyously, chaotically present.