Domestic cat

Domestic cats recur in sharply different forms: as animals fed in a fairground caravan, as the gravely injured victim of a New Year’s Eve collision, and as the subject of Ferdinand’s cross-section drawings. The contrast makes the cat more than a passing detail: its vulnerable body exposes how care, helplessness, and violence meet in the narrator’s encounters with animals.

Living Cats and Human Care

While looking for work dismantling a fairground bumper-car attraction, the narrator and a friend visit a caravan occupied by an obese man and several equally obese cats. The man feeds them pieces of meat from a tin. The brief scene gives the cats a place within an ordinary domestic routine, even in the unusual setting of a fairground caravan; their presence is not explained further, and none is individually identified.

The New Year’s Eve Collision

Driving through Eggebek shortly before midnight, the narrator feels a dull impact and stops in a long curve to investigate. About fifteen metres behind the car, a cat lies on its side, bloodied and badly injured, licking its open abdomen. When it tries to move, it drags its wounded body towards the roadside ditch. The narrator returns to the car for a kitchen towel and approaches again, but cannot find a way to help. The scene unfolds against the preparations for the New Year. At 11:47, the narrator turns up the radio; as the broadcast counts down to midnight and plays The Final Countdown, the cat’s legs twitch against the towel and its body shudders. Celebration and suffering occupy the same stretch of road, but the music and distant fireworks offer no remedy for the animal’s injury.

A Stranger’s Intervention

At a quarter past twelve, an older man in a Mercedes stops after the narrator signals for help. He looks at the cat and judges that it cannot be saved, then kills it with a blow from his rubber boot. He pushes the body into the ditch with his shoe, wipes the blood from it on the grass, and drives off after exchanging New Year’s greetings with the narrator. The encounter ends the cat’s suffering, but its blunt violence contrasts with the narrator’s helpless attempt to cover the animal and wait for assistance.

Cats as Images

On a later visit to the narrator’s father, Ferdinand sits at the table drawing one of his familiar cats in cross-section. The living animal at the roadside and the cat rendered as a drawing are distinct appearances, not a single continuing character; together with the fairground cats, they establish a small but varied recurrence. The cross-section image also gives the animal a place in Ferdinand’s habitual art, while the collision episode makes its exposed body impossible to treat as merely an image. Across these scenes, cats are encountered through human actions—feeding, drawing, and responding to injury—yet the New Year’s episode holds attention on the animal’s physical suffering rather than turning it into a simple emblem.