42 pages • 1 hour read
Andre AlexisA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Though the novel follows the fates of 15 dogs, its jumping off point is a discussion between Apollo and Hermes about human nature and whether human intelligence, which they define broadly as symbolic language, makes humans superior to other mortal creatures. Apollo claims human languages are “too vague” (14). Hermes concedes that this may be true but counters that it makes humans more amusing than other creatures because they would “swear they understood each other,” but “not one of them has any idea what their words actually mean to another” (14). Hermes’s observation ring true repeatedly through various relationships explored in the text, most explicitly through Nira and Majnoun’s relationship.
The disconnect between Majnoun and Nira centers around the distinct ways they gather and process information. Nira’s method is emotional and intellectual while Majnoun’s is sensory. Nira considers abstract, ambiguous concepts like God, religion, government, and love by examining their ideals and her feelings about them. Majnoun, meanwhile, considers these same concepts through sense perception. Nira describes love, the concept they discuss in the most detail, as “[t]he feeling you have for your mother” (49), but Majnoun cannot recall whether he ever knew his mother and, if so, whether he felt any emotional connection to her. Since he cannot conceive of love in the terms Nira provides, he substitutes his experience of attraction to females, which is a biological imperative based on scent and power rather than an emotional imperative. Nira and Majnoun seemingly disagree but in actuality are not speaking of like things because their frames of reference do not align.
According to the dogs who have lost their dog language, dog language is direct and clear because it is based on sense perception, presumably a more empirical factor than thought and abstraction. Scent, sight, and sound are forms of communication with a limited range of meanings. Dogs use them, for example, to signal their desire to challenge another for dominance. A fight ensues, and the winner assumes a higher spot in the echelon. Whether dog language is as clear as the 15 dogs remember it, however, is questionable since they are remembering with nostalgic longing a language they have not been able to replicate since receiving human knowledge.
While Hermes may be right about humans, he fails to realize that his observation also applies to himself and Apollo as well. They never establish common ground for speaking about and assessing humans. Thus, their language is as vague as human language; they are not speaking out of shared beliefs and references. When they realize that they are not defining happiness in the same terms, conflict ensues, and it has negative repercussions on the dogs whose lives the gods continually meddle with. Language, whether human, animal, or divine, shapes and contains meaning in endlessly variable ways, and is therefore unable to pin down. It is the paradox that enables art to connect across differences while simultaneously causing the trauma of misunderstanding, for mortal and immortal alike.
The ancient Greek word for history, historia, means inquiry. Framing Apollo and Hermes’s bet in Herodotean terms frames the novel as an inquiry into happiness. Each of the dogs provides a lens for testing various definitions of happiness that have corollaries in ancient Greek philosophy. Does happiness derive from friendship, freedom, and reflection, as Epicurus suggested? Is it acceptance of what is, rather than resistance, as Epictetus proposed? Is it virtue, luck, and wisdom, as Aristotle argued? Or is it hope and love, as Hermes implies, in contrast to Solon? In the narrative, it can be many of these definitions.
By the bet’s terms, only Prince is determined to be happy, since his is the only spirit that feels joyful in his last moment. But the dogs’ varied experiences—in particular those of Majnoun, Athena, Bella, and Benjy—challenge Apollo and Hermes’s, and by extension Solon’s, definition of happiness as too limited in scope. Bella and Athena felt fear when they died, but self-consciousness also enabled them to develop a deep emotional bond that brought them fulfillment and belonging in life. In his last moment, Majnoun experiences deep sorrow at his separation from Nira. Yet his deep connection with her provided him a sense of completion in life. Benjy found what enjoyment he could in life but felt both confused about its unfairness and hopeful of a better beyond at his time of death.
Solon notes that the best lives can end unhappily, and the worst can end well. Fifteen Dogs suggests that happiness is too complex, ambiguous, and varied a concept for anyone to reduce it to a single joyous moment. Fear or anxiety at the moment of death does not negate the fullness of one’s life, and what confers purpose, meaning, belonging, and/or fulfillment may not always bring joy.
In ancient Greek thought, balance is not an idealized middle ground but a state of properly weighted opposing elements, as symbolized by the scales of justice. Imbalances can lead to tragic events, whether mythic (the Trojan War) or historic (the Persian and Peloponnesian wars covered by Herodotus and Thucydides respectively). After he hears about Apollo and Hermes’s bet, Zeus is furious because they have tampered with the natural order. The cruelty of their experiment lies in the unnatural gifting of abstract language—a human trait—to dogs. Granting them a skill outside of their scope disrupts the natural world’s inherent balance, which causes the dog’s to suffer more than humans because it provokes them to feel in ways they’re not designed to navigate.
On the individual level, having a sense of proportion, or balance, is a virtue that enables good judgment, which then leads to positive outcomes. The Odyssey’s Odysseus repeatedly demonstrates self-control when faced with challenges and obstacles, natural and divinely imposed. He is able to put aside his anger or frustration to focus on the task at hand, and this enables him to achieve his goals. Prince repeatedly demonstrates this trait in Fifteen Dogs. The Iliad’s Achilles conversely lacks a sense of proportion and allows his anger to spiral into destructive rage. Atticus and the pack’s murders result from a similar lack of proportion. Atticus murders other dogs because he feels too much. His instincts as a hunter are at war with the empathy that he feels for his prey, provoked by self-consciousness, and it becomes unbearable. The murders of Athena and Bella start a downward spiral of excessive, unnecessary violence—fueled by imbalance—that lead to the pack’s disintegration and death.