Seals

Seals are the only animals at the zoo that appeal to Fiete Honka. Their calm movements and deliberate eating briefly draw him out of his alienation, before he imagines becoming one of them—or even a tiny organism drifting below the water’s surface.

The Animals Fiete Watches

The day after an episode of alcohol-induced mental fog, Fiete finds the polar bears dirty and dulled, but the seals are different: they tumble about comfortably or lie still, their thick layers of blubber making them seem at ease. He enjoys watching them eat because, unlike animals that simply gulp their food, they chew as though they take pleasure in it.

One seal holds a fish between its two flippers and studies it before biting off its head. It then tears the flesh from the bones in small pieces. The scene is presented through Fiete’s close attention to the animal’s practical, unhurried handling of its meal.

Fiete’s Imagined Escape

Watching the seals, Fiete imagines becoming one, or a still smaller aquatic creature: a microbe drifting through a motionless, lukewarm sea of twilight. The fantasy moves beyond admiration of the seals into a wish to exchange his present human existence for a submerged life stripped to drifting and being. The seals matter in the scene not as performers for a visitor but as the focus of an attention that briefly finds their way of living preferable to his own.