The Sympathy Exams: Dog Narratives and the Arc of Interspecies Sympathy
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This essay examines representations of the canine narrator in W. Bruce Cameron’s A Dog’s Purpose (2010). With a focus on the ways in which the single protagonist/narrator engages with a series of episodes of close companionship with its human masters, this article highlights affective dimensions of the narrative. At stake in this contemporary dog narrative is Cameron’s rendition of the canine protagonist as the one who is privileged to go through multiples lives in a row with its memory of previous lives intact. Contrary to ongoing debates about whether animal intelligence is equivalent to or surpasses that of its human counterparts, Cameron’s canine characters are portrayed instead as so loyal and accommodating to the varying needs of its human master(s) that the narrative seems to reify existing interspecies relationships and rather highlights the limit of anthropocentric representations of a dog. And yet, at the same time, A Dog’s Purpose provides ample opportunities to attest and thereby theorize the parameter of human-nonhuman kinships by representing multiple cases about animal sensorium and sentience, human dominion over nonhuman species, and the fantastically constructed multiple lives of a dog. It should be noted that in an effort to attest to the actual conditions for eliciting sympathy, and to attain a rather egalitarian understanding of nonhuman species, I align Cameron’s recent novel A Dog’s Purpose with a handful of eighteenth-century representations of dogs.
Abstract
This essay examines representations of the canine narrator in W. Bruce Cameron’s A Dog’s Purpose (2010). With a focus on the ways in which the single protagonist/narrator engages with a series of episodes of close companionship with its human masters, this article highlights affective dimensions of the narrative. At stake in this contemporary dog narrative is Cameron’s rendition of the canine protagonist as the one who is privileged to go through multiples lives in a row with its memory of previous lives intact. Contrary to ongoing debates about whether animal intelligence is equivalent to or surpasses that of its human counterparts, Cameron’s canine characters are portrayed instead as so loyal and accommodating to the varying needs of its human master(s) that the narrative seems to reify existing interspecies relationships and rather highlights the limit of anthropocentric representations of a dog. And yet, at the same time, A Dog’s Purpose provides ample opportunities to attest and thereby theorize the parameter of human-nonhuman kinships by representing multiple cases about animal sensorium and sentience, human dominion over nonhuman species, and the fantastically constructed multiple lives of a dog. It should be noted that in an effort to attest to the actual conditions for eliciting sympathy, and to attain a rather egalitarian understanding of nonhuman species, I align Cameron’s recent novel A Dog’s Purpose with a handful of eighteenth-century representations of dogs.
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