Monkeys

Monkeys are the evolutionary rivals in Enzo’s speculative theory of human origins: they possess the thumbs he covets, yet he refuses to accept them as humanity’s closest kin. The contrast gives his reflections their comic edge and their deeper purpose. Enzo uses a familiar scientific debate to propose a different kinship between humans and dogs, while his confident claims reveal how his keen observations mingle with personal grievance, fantasy, and spiritual belief.

A Rival in the Human-Origin Story

Enzo’s fixation begins with a plain physical fact: monkeys have thumbs. To him, this advantage seems especially unfair because he imagines thumbs as something dogs were meant to have. He judges monkeys dimly, placing them near the bottom of his private scale of intelligence, but their hands give them a capability he longs for. His irritation makes the evolutionary comparison personal: monkeys are not merely another species but competitors who possess an ability denied to him.

That resentment sits alongside his awareness of human differences. In his account of his relationship with Denny and Eve, Enzo sees Eve’s hands and capacity for human touch as part of what distinguishes her from him. He understands that he cannot participate in human life on equal terms, even as he imagines what he might do if he had a human body. The monkey’s thumb therefore stands for more than dexterity. It marks the boundary between animal and human that Enzo both observes and wants to cross.

Evolution, Science, and the Soul

Enzo encounters discussions of evolution through television. When Denny leaves in the morning, he turns the television on for him; Enzo watches racing programs as well as educational broadcasts, including programs on the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and PBS. Those shows prompt him to think about different cultures, ways of life, and humanity’s place in the world. His theory grows out of this habit of watching and wondering, rather than from any independent scientific investigation.

He objects to treating evolution and creation as mutually exclusive explanations. In his view, bodily evolution and spiritual development can belong to one continuous process: bodies change, souls change, and eventually a body becomes sufficiently human for a human soul to enter it. This account lets him accept evolutionary change while preserving a distinct role for spiritual life. It also makes the origin of humanity a question not only about anatomy, but about the moment a soul becomes possible within a changing body.

Enzo challenges the primate-centered account by questioning what evidence can establish close kinship. He refers to similarities between ancient skulls and modern humans, and to primates walking upright, but argues that these observations do not prove the conclusion drawn from them. His criticism is not a balanced scientific rebuttal; it is part of a deliberately comic argument by a dog who distrusts the human claim to define the family tree. He disputes the interpretation of the evidence and then advances his own preferred answer: the dog.

The Dog as Humanity’s True Relative

Enzo presents his alternative as a case, announcing the dew claw as its first point. The surviving discussion identifies that heading but does not supply the details of the argument that follows it, so the particular role he assigns to the dew claw remains unspecified. Even so, the structure is telling: he borrows the language of evidence and numbered examples to give his instinctive conviction the form of a reasoned theory.

His second example turns to the werewolf. He imagines a familiar transformation scene in which a man emerges from a dark forest under a full moon, then asks whether the transformed creature is a monkey. Enzo rejects that answer. The joke relies on the expected monster becoming something ordinary and evolutionary, only to have the expected primate explanation dismissed. Rather than prove his theory, the scene shows how he uses parody to unsettle a story of human origins that leaves dogs outside the line of kinship.

The theory’s central claim is that dogs, not chimpanzees, are humanity’s closest relatives. Enzo does not offer a neutral account of species relationships; he is arguing for recognition. His imagined kinship reverses the usual hierarchy in which humans explain animals from a position of superiority. Dogs become not failed or lesser humans, but the species whose future development might make them humanity’s equal—or even its superior.

Thumbs, Domestication, and Enzo’s Counter-Myth

Enzo extends his account from ancestry into a fantasy about domestication. He proposes that people keep dogs under supervision because they fear what dogs might become if allowed to evolve independently: animals with thumbs, less cumbersome bodies, and social views ahead of their human keepers. He further imagines that dogs living on their own are put to death as part of this suppression. These claims are Enzo’s conspiracy theory, not established events in the novel’s world.

He traces the imagined plan to a secret meeting in the White House, speculating that a morally and intellectually dubious presidential adviser devised it. His premise, which he attributes to what Denny has told him about government, converts human control of dogs into a political plot. The theory is deliberately extravagant, but it gives shape to Enzo’s sense that the species boundary is also a power boundary: humans control dogs not simply because they can, but because they fear what dogs could become.

The monkey consequently occupies an unstable place in Enzo’s argument. It is the animal commonly presented as closest to humanity, an opponent with the coveted thumb, and a punchline in his rejected werewolf transformation. Yet monkeys are not developed as individual characters or encountered in a concrete animal scene here. They function as the foil against which Enzo makes his larger claim about dogs, evolution, and the possibility of a soul entering an animal body. The comic overconfidence of that claim invites readers to distinguish what Enzo can observe from what he imagines; his theory reveals as much about his desire for human recognition as it does about the monkeys he describes.