Rat

The Rat is one of the many animals that populate the narrator's domestic world in this novel, a creature that surfaces at two crucial moments of psychological and marital strain. It is never a pet or a companion like the dog Bloody, nor a majestic counterpoint like the stag with its golden eye; instead, the rat appears as a wild intruder and then as a decaying relic, marking the boundaries of the home and the decay festering within it. Its two appearances frame a period of escalating crisis between the narrator and her husband, and it belongs to the book's dense bestiary of creatures that mirror, provoke, and absorb her volatile inner states.

The Rat on the Roof

The rat first appears during one of the narrator's sleepless nights while her husband is away, a period she describes as one in which every second of silence is followed by a hoard of demons infiltrating her brain. In the midst of this nocturnal torment, a rat jumps onto the see-through roof of the house. The narrator's observation that the creature "seems to be enjoying herself, the crazy little thing" is striking for its flicker of identification: the rat is female, and she is framed as a kind of mad counterpart, at home in the darkness that terrifies the narrator. The image joins a cascade of animal visions that overtake her that night — the aghh, aghh of an owl, which she hears as a genital, involuntary, and erotic sound, and the imagined orgy of a stag, a rat, and a wild boar, their legs, wings, tails, and scales tangled together and racing towards pleasure. The rat thus enters the text as part of a jumble of creatures that is at first laughable and then suddenly frightening, a vision of animal vitality and menace that the narrator cannot quite contain.

The Dried-Up Rat Behind the Gas Cylinder

The rat's second appearance is of a wholly different order. During a bitter domestic confrontation, the husband, alarmed by the sight of the dog's piss and broken glass on the floor, asks the narrator what she is doing just sitting there. When she refuses to engage, he reveals what he has found in the kitchen: behind the gas cylinder, a dried-up rat and some worms. The discovery is deployed as evidence of the narrator's failure to care for the house, and by extension, for her family. The husband's question — "How long has our baby been eating food cooked on that stove?" — turns the dead rat into an indictment of her motherhood. The narrator, however, refuses the accusation and retorts by pointing out his own failings, asking how long their son has been eating off plates and mugs that serve as his ashtrays. The dried-up rat thus becomes a weapon in the couple's war of recrimination, an object that each spouse uses to demonstrate the other's negligence.

The Rat and the Rotting Household

The two appearances of the rat trace a movement from the outside to the inside, from the living creature on the transparent roof to the desiccated corpse hidden behind the stove. The first rat is wild, mobile, and even joyful, a creature of the night that the narrator can watch with a kind of bemused horror. The second is a relic, dried up and immobile, a sign of decay that has been festering unnoticed in the heart of the home. Together they embody the novel's larger preoccupation with the failure of the domestic space to contain or protect. The house, once a dairy farm, is a place where objects either get cleared away or get broken as the light changes and things start to decline, and the rat's corpse is one of the things that has been left to rot. The narrator's refusal to clean it up, like her refusal to wipe up the dog's piss, is a form of passive resistance, a way of forcing the decay into visibility rather than sweeping it under the rug.

The Rat in the Novel's Bestiary

The rat belongs to a broader pattern of animal imagery that runs through the novel, in which creatures serve as mirrors of the narrator's psychological states and as markers of the boundary between the human and the non-human. The narrator's relationship to animals is consistently ambivalent: she electrocutes bees, sets fire to ants in matchboxes, stamps on worms and grasshoppers, and leaves cups of beer out for slugs to drown in, yet she also imagines an orgy of animals with a kind of fascinated horror and identifies with the rat on the roof as a "crazy little thing." The rat, like the owl and the stag, is part of a bestiary that the narrator both fears and feels drawn to, a world of instinct and appetite that stands in stark contrast to the sterile routines of her marriage. In this context, the dried-up rat behind the gas cylinder is not merely a sign of domestic neglect but a symptom of a deeper rot, a household in which the wild has been driven out or killed, leaving only desiccated remains.