Animal Dreams Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

If you've heard of carob pods before, it might be because someone tried to convince you that they're a healthy substitute for chocolate. Let us be the first to tell you: they're not. Just eat the c...

Grace is a town of orchards. In some of the first scenes of the novel, we see Codi walking through a pecan orchard on her way to the Domingos house. Later, as she walks back toward downtown with Jo...

Nowhere is the relationship between trees and hope for the future clearer than in our final example of the fruit-tree symbolism of Animal Dreams. It's the "Semilla Besada" we're talking about, or "...

This afghan is a black and red knitted blanket. Hallie and Codi carried it everywhere when they were kids. When Codi returns to Grace as an adult, she finds it folded up in the chaos of her father'...

Symbols associated with vision play a huge role in Animal Dreams. The eyeball dream, Doc's photographs, and the dark cave all mark stages of development in Codi's ability to remember her past and f...

Doc calls himself "the only man on earth who can photograph the past" (13.4). Classic Doc arrogance. Of course, Doc is no more photographing the past than he is actually experiencing it when teenag...

In a scene that draws on Doc and Codi's shared medical experience, Doc makes the point that the human heart is the wrong organ to symbolize the fragile human ego. The heart is tough. It's easy to s...

All throughout the text, Codi makes a huge deal of the orthopedic shoes she and Hallie had to wear. They both hated them, burning the catalogues when they arrived in the mail as kids so that their...

Throughout much of the novel, Loyd is a self-identified rooster-fighting man. In the one and only conversation we get to witness between Codi and J.T, who is Loyd's best friend, Loyd explains exact...

The peacocks of Grace, Arizona are an inheritance from the founders of the town, the Gracela sisters who came over from Spain to marry a bunch of miners, with their peacocks in tow. The peacocks ar...

The war twins are mentioned a few times by Loyd and then Codi, primarily in the chapters devoted to the trip that they take to Navajo and Pueblo lands. They come from a Tewa Pueblo story from the d...