Rabbits

Rabbits in I Know This Much Is True are both vulnerable animals and bearers of meanings that shift across generations. They appear in the ordinary economy of a village butcher’s cart, in a childhood tale of miraculous doubling, and as therapy animals at a children’s hospice. Their most consequential recurrence links Prosperine’s memory of a rabbit becoming two with Dominick’s attempt to seek her forgiveness: near the end of the novel, he brings two hospice rabbits to her and stages the reverse transformation. Across these scenes, rabbits connect the fragile body to the possibility of multiplication, separation, and reunion.

Animals in Prosperine’s Village

As a girl, Prosperine watches Ciccolina, an old butcher-woman, make her morning journey to the village square with a small cart weighted with coops. The animals inside are scrawny hares and half-bald hens, sold to customers who choose what they will eat. Ciccolina’s work is part of the village’s everyday life, but to Prosperine it is also a spectacle that draws and repels her. The rabbits are not abstract emblems at first: they are confined animals whose fate depends on the people who buy and handle them.

Ciccolina is surrounded by rumors of witchcraft. People believe she can both cure and inflict the evil eye, and her reputation makes the butcher’s ordinary work seem charged with hidden power. That atmosphere shapes how Prosperine understands what she sees. The rabbits become part of a world in which practical acts, cruelty, superstition, and magic are difficult to separate.

The most striking encounter occurs when a customer complains about the price and Ciccolina, already ill and angry, decides to give him twice the meat. She directs Prosperine to hold a rabbit while she cuts it in half. The act is described as a near miss for the two women, but its result overturns the expected fate of the animal: instead of dying, each half grows into a complete, living rabbit. Prosperine and the schoolmaster witness what she understands as magic. The scene gives the rabbit a narrative function unlike its earlier role in the coops: it becomes the center of an impossible multiplication, one creature becoming two without loss of life.

A Story That Travels Between Generations

The miraculous rabbit belongs first to Prosperine’s childhood, but its meaning does not remain in the past. In her later account, rabbits sit alongside other stories of magic and misfortune, shaping how listeners interpret events. When Dominick hears religious talk about loaves and fishes, his thoughts turn to Prosperine’s tale of the witch who made two rabbits from one. His mind, he says, is confused by magic and miracles. The recollection shows the story working not only as folklore within Prosperine’s life but also as a frame through which Dominick tries to make sense of the world around him.

Rabbit imagery also carries an intimate family meaning. Dominick recalls that Ma treated the twins as contrasting small creatures: Thomas was her cuddly little bunny rabbit, while Dominick was her little spider monkey. The names register affection, but they also sit within Dominick’s painful sense that Thomas was easier for Ma to love. The rabbit thus becomes part of a remembered language of unequal attention and sibling identity, not simply a sign of innocence. It marks Thomas as the child Ma drew close, while Dominick remembers himself through a different animal comparison.

That association deepens when Dominick speaks about the promise he made to his mother before she died: he was to take care of Thomas and keep him safe, her little bunny rabbit. Dominick connects that promise to the obligations he sees in his grandfather’s life and admits that both men failed to keep their word. In this recollection, the rabbit is inseparable from care, but also from the guilt of care that could not guarantee protection. The animal’s vulnerability gives emotional weight to the promise without making the promise’s failure disappear.

Vulnerability, Violence, and Protection

The rabbit’s fate in Prosperine’s story resonates with the danger faced by Violetta, whose life has been altered by Gallante Selvi’s abuse. Prosperine sees her friend as resembling the doomed animals in Ciccolina’s cages, tethered to a fate she did not choose. When Violetta returns to Pescara and tells Prosperine about the violence and humiliation she has suffered, Prosperine’s grief turns toward revenge. She butchers rabbits and imagines each one as standing in for Gallante, but she recognizes that killing him openly would put her freedom and her ability to protect Violetta at risk.

The rabbits therefore register both helplessness and the desire to intervene. Prosperine’s first response is to try to use the evil eye against Gallante, an attempt to wield the power that village belief attributes to Ciccolina. The earlier miracle of the divided rabbit offers a counterimage to the animals’ ordinary vulnerability, but it does not provide a simple solution to human violence. In the revenge episode, Prosperine remains constrained by the consequences of any action she might take; the rabbits embody the danger she wants to answer, not a power that can reliably undo it.

The Hospice Rabbits and the Final Reversal

Much later, rabbits enter Dominick’s life in the children’s hospice where Dessa works. He passes the animals during a visit, and they are identified as pet-therapy rabbits. Their presence belongs to a setting of care for sick children, far removed from Ciccolina’s market and its coops. Yet the animals also reactivate the old story: for Dominick, they are not merely part of the hospice’s surroundings but living reminders of Prosperine’s miraculous rabbit and of the history he carries with her.

During a hurricane, Dominick goes to the hospice and takes the two rabbits from their cage, telling an aide that he will bring them back. He carries them to Prosperine, who is dying, and asks her to forgive him and make him whole again. Holding the rabbits before her, he first displays both, then returns one to the box and keeps the other in view. The sequence makes the pair appear to become one. Dominick understands the gesture as a reversal of the dark magic Prosperine witnessed long ago: where her childhood story multiplied one rabbit into two, he makes two seem to reunite as one.

The act does not establish that the rabbits literally change form; its force lies in the staged image and its timing. Dominick turns animals borrowed from a hospice into messengers between a childhood memory and a present plea for forgiveness. Prosperine opens her eyes to watch, and her hand emerges from beneath the sheet. The rabbits do not erase the history that separates them, nor does the scene report what she says in response. Instead, their brief appearance gives Dominick a way to address that history through an image Prosperine herself once made unforgettable.

Narrative Significance

The novel’s rabbits move through sharply different circumstances: as market animals exposed to human control, as subjects of an impossible miracle, as figures in a family nickname and promise, and as hospice animals brought into a final act of reconciliation. That recurrence is not a single fixed allegory. The same creature can signify exposure to harm, a mother’s tenderness toward Thomas, a burden of responsibility, or the hope of making a divided relationship whole.

The contrast between the two rabbit stories gives the motif its shape. Prosperine’s childhood vision transforms division into multiplication; Dominick’s final gesture reverses the image, making separation appear to close. In each case, the rabbits carry more than one meaning at once: the animals remain particular creatures even as the people who watch them invest them with memory, fear, affection, and hope. Their return lets the novel bring a private family history into view without claiming that a symbolic act can undo the losses or failures that created it.