A Boy and His Dog (Criticism)

Criticism

Jennifer Bussey

Bussey holds a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies and a bachelor’s degree in English Literature. She is an independent writer specializing in literature. In the following essay, Bussey explores the significance of the role reversal that characterizes the relationship between Vic and Blood in Ellison’s story.

As indicated by the title, “A Boy and His Dog” is about the relationship between the two main characters in the story, a teenager named Vic and his telepathic dog named Blood. Among the many unusual qualities of this story is the role-reversal that characterizes this human-canine relationship. Ellison inverts what the reader understands as the dynamic between a person and a dog, making the human the more impulsive character and the dog the more thoughtful one. The author’s use of inversion in the story reflects the dramatic changes that have taken place on Earth since the War demolished it physically, socially, and culturally. Ellison’s presentation of inversions also suggests that perhaps the present is not as stable as the reader might think. The relationship between Vic and Blood shows how something that is taken for granted in the present — the dynamics between people and their pets — might be inverted in the future.

Because Vic is human, the reader expects him to be levelheaded, dominant, caring, and intelligent. He should be Blood’s guide, providing for his needs and taking charge of navigating them through the human world. Instead, Vic is impulsive, instinctual, uneducated, and weakened by his base drives. Ellison relates Vic’s animal nature on the first page when Vic tells Blood to find him a woman because he needs sex. When Blood teases him, Vic is too blinded by his sexual drive to respond good-naturedly; he is mad at Blood for not immediately responding to his needs. For Vic, sex is not a mutual, loving act; it is rape, and his only concern is fulfilling his need, without regard for the woman he finds.

Vic is also violent, sometimes in reaction to being physically threatened, and sometimes in reaction to having his lifestyle threatened. He, Blood, and Quilla June are threatened by the presence of the roverpak in the YMCA, so Vic reacts by hiding and killing as many of them as he can. This is an example of the basic “fight or flight” instinct, and Vic never chooses flight. In his environment, there is no way to run away from a situation safely, so he has learned to respond to danger with violence. Later, when his carefree, roaming, crude lifestyle is threatened by the leaders of Topeka, he responds like a caged animal. In essence, he wants to return to his native habitat.

Blood, as a dog, could be expected to be an instinct-driven, submissive, and obedient creature who constantly seeks his master’s approval. Instead, Blood is the intelligent one in the relationship. He is educated, clever, clear-thinking, and wise. While Vic is impulsive and short-sighted, Blood is levelheaded and strategic, thinking through his plans and choices. He is Vic’s instructor, teaching him reading, math, history, and culture. Blood is more intuitive than Vic is, and he has a better understanding of their society.

Blood tries to act as Vic’s advisor. When Vic is irrational, Blood attempts to reason with him and guide him to make better decisions. He warns Vic that he does not trust Quilla June and that Vic should not pursue her underground. Although he is rational, Blood is also able to be fierce when necessary. His complex nature is best revealed in the scene in which he and Vic fight the roverpak at the YMCA. Blood attacks by going for the throat, but he also devises a plan to try to fool the roverpak into thinking they (Vic, Blood, and Quilla June) are all dead.

In considering the role-reversal in the relationship between Vic and Blood, an important distinction must be made. Vic has reverted to an animallike state as a result of his environment, while Blood has evolved to a more rational state as a result of genetic engineering. Vic is genetically the same as present-day readers, but his extreme environment makes him very different. On the other hand, Blood is nothing like present-day dogs. He is evolved by design. Ellison supports the dynamics of the role-reversal in his characterization of Quilla June. Although she lives in a seemingly pleasant city underground, she has a very violent nature. Ellison makes the point that the artificiality of the picket fences and gumball machines of the recreated pre-World War I city can mask, but not erase, the horrors of the war that sent them all underground in the first place. The environment, then, is not restricted to the immediate and visible world, but includes the realities of the history that created it.

Through Vic’s reversion to an animal state as a result of his environment and Blood’s acceleration to a highly evolved state as a result of genetic manipulation, Ellison makes a strong statement about the power of external and internal influences. The story becomes a twist on the long-standing psychological debate about the dominance of “nature” or “nurture.” The debate most often centers on the question of whether nature (genetics) or nurture (environment) affects creatures more powerfully. Ellison’s story focuses more on the fact that neither alone is enough to yield a self-sufficient creature. These two characters are brought together because each needs the other. Neither is fully capable of functioning alone. In spite of his animal-like survival skills, Vic needs Blood to help warn him of danger and to provide intelligent counsel. And for all his intellect and keen sense of smell, Blood still needs Vic to find food for him and to care for his wounds.

Beyond the practical aspects of their relationship, Ellison demonstrates that the bond between Vic and Blood is forged in part by the same force that brings people and animals together today — loyalty. Even in the extreme environment and bizarre circumstances of the story’s dystopic setting, there is something vaguely familiar in the inverted relationship between Vic and Blood.

Source: Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on “A Boy and His Dog,” in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Cody Walker

Walker teaches writing and literature courses at the University of Washington. In the following essay, Walker tracks the ways in which Ellison’s story suffers from misogynistic and adolescent posturing.

When Marlon Brando, in the 1953 film The Wild One, is asked what he’s rebelling against, he answers, “Whaddaya got?” It’s an iconic moment in twentieth-century art: a young man casting off societal constraints. In Harlan Ellison’s “A Boy and His Dog,” Vic adopts this spirit of amorphous protest. He rails against “squares” with “nice whitewashed fences”; he turns manicured poodles into dog chow. What he doesn’t do is demonstrate the advantages to be found in the rebellious stance. Vic gains freedom of a sort, but he remains frozen in his own misogynistic and adolescent postures. It’s a trade-off with which Ellison appears comfortable.

Ellison’s work has long trumpeted the outsider, the dissenter, the man neither caste- nor clock-conscious. By calling his 1988 short story collection Angry Candy, Ellison allied himself with another self-proclaimed rebel, the poet e. e. cummings. The allusion is to cummings’s “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls,” a satiric poem in which upper-class ladies exercise their “comfortable minds” by bandying “scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D.” The ladies’ social consciences are eased by knitting sweaters. The moon, meanwhile, offers protest, rattling in the sky “like a fragment of angry candy.” Ellison’s characters confront orthodox thought just as angrily as cummings’s moon does. In ‘“Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” Ellison’s hero is accused of being a non-conformist. “That didn’t used to be a felony,” he replies. “It is now,” the totalitarian figure shoots back. “Live in the world around you.” But Ellison’s characters are rarely able to live in the worlds around them.

“A Boy and His Dog” illustrates the problem neatly. Vic devotes much of his time “above-ground” searching for sex — a search that, more times than not, is unsuccessful. Lured “downunder,” he learns that the townspeople of Topeka plan to employ him as a stud service. For someone whose taste in movies runs to “Big Black Leather Splits,” this development is, as Vic says, “too good to be true.” But rather than continue to revel in his good fortune, he finds that within a week he’s “ready to scream.”

For Ellison’s Topeka is full of cummings’s Cambridge ladies — conservatives too self-content to notice a wider world around them. Vic sees them as “squares of the worst kind,” “lawanorder goofs,” Better Business Bureau bumblers who rake lawns, collect milk bottles, and listen to oompah bands in the park. Existence for the Topekans is a collective experience; Vic is, by definition, a solo. He’s also, by Ellison’s reckoning, a natural man, a figure who acts on instinct and who feels kinship with the mountains and forests and moon. He balks at the Topekans’ “artificial peas and fake meat and make-believe chicken and ersatz corn”; he denounces the “lying, hypocritical crap they called civility.” Vic imagines himself on the side of the truth-teller, the outlaw, the man who can’t be bullied or bought. Trapped in the tin can of Topeka, among people with comfortable minds, he sets forth to free himself, brass balls and rattle in hand.

In the introduction to his story “The Crackpots,” Ellison writes disparagingly of the “faceless gray hordes of sidewalk sliders who go from there to here without so much as a hop, skip or a jump.” That hopping and skipping sound like child’s play is no accident; Ellison’s prescription for society’s ills usually involves a return to adolescence. The “above-ground” scenes of “A Boy and His Dog” resemble a teenage boy’s fantasy, complete with movies and gymnasiums and naked girls. (The fantasy is even educational, as Vic notes the manner in which Quilla June puts on her bra. “I never knew the way chicks did it,” he confesses.) Gestures toward youth-fulness abound: Vic and Quilla June have sex on a wrestling mat; goods are exchanged by the barter system; the Metropole Theater is run by a rascally roverpak named Our Gang. And, of course, there’s the story’s conclusion. Boys do love their dogs.

The conclusion demands attention. A young woman who has been objectified throughout the story (as “that girl” or “that Quilla June”) is killed and cooked and made into dog food. (L. Q. Jones, who wrote and directed the screen version of Ellison’s fantasy, turns Quilla June’s predicament into a terrible joke. “She said she loved me,” Vic tells Blood. The dog replies, “Well, I’d say she certainly had marvelous judgment, Albert — if not particularly good taste.” Boy and dog laugh; credits roll.) Ursula K. Le Guin, in her introduction to The Norton Book of Science Fiction, writes that patterns of misogyny in science fiction are “often so brainlessly repetitive as to debase stories otherwise inventive and imaginative.” In “A Boy and His Dog,” Vic imagines women to be sub-human and disposable (“All the ones I’d ever seen had been scumbags that Blood had smelled out for me, and I’d snatchn’grabbed them”). Some of Ellison’s best-known stories — “The Prowler in the City “and “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” — feature women in appalling situations. Even a relatively mild work, “The City on the Edge of Forever” (Ellison’s Hugo Award-winning Star Trek script), turns on the need for a female sacrifice.

On the DVD version of A Boy and His Dog, the director talks about reactions to the film after its 1975 release. “The first time out,” Jones says, “women’s groups went bonkers.” While it would be folly to suggest that the movie shouldn’t be seen or the story shouldn’t be read (Ellison has long spoken forcefully against censorship), it’s fair to consider the strategies of either work in terms of artistic effect. The problem with the level of misogyny in the story is that it’s not in service of anything greater than itself. There’s no interesting irony or cathartic terror or unsettling surrealism — what remains is Ellison, very much present, saying “look what I can get away with.” And “look what I can get away with” is an adolescent posture.

“Look what I can get away with” also contains a dash of self-congratulation, and that’s a deadly ingredient for protest art. The most effective works of social protest are often the quietest: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska to name a few. Too much hullabaloo and muscle flexing turn the focus away from the target and toward the one doing the targeting. (Ellison’s novella All the Lies That Are My Life was published with six afterwords by six different writers; the narcissism of the venture is almost comic.) “Strange Wine,” the 1976 Ellison story that Le Guin selected for The Norton Book of Science Fiction, shows Ellison in a more restrained, less smug, mode. Willis Kaw lives on Earth but believes himself to be an alien. Plagued by earthly troubles and longing to return home, Willis commits suicide — only to find that he is indeed an alien and that his home planet is a place of true torment. (Earth, it turns out, is known throughout the galaxy as “the pleasure planet.”) An interesting study of relativism, “Strange Wine” shows Ellison working with familiar themes, but without the self-congratulatory tone that can be so crippling to his art.

In the introduction to his Collected Poems, cummings writes that “it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves that the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.” Along with a love for compound-word coinages, cummings and Ellison share a presumption about their readerships that is dangerously exclusionary. Cummings expects support as he knocks down old ladies; Ellison wants cheering as he battles the “squares.” To react otherwise would be to incite the moon’s wrath or be labeled a Topekan. But life is more complicated than either of these positions allows for, and art has a responsibility to address those complications. Ask a Cambridge lady the right question and you may find a passion for zoology, or printmaking, or higher mathematics. Explore a place like Topeka (either the current city, or Ellison’s “downunder” version) and you’re likely to encounter some free spirits in the mix. (Quilla June is certainly a free spirit, but Ellison so exaggerates her lust for sex and blood that she becomes cartoonish rather than complex.) Yes, the world needs more harlequins, more rattlers, more hoppers and jumpers, but it also needs more people who can ask questions, who don’t presume to have everything and everyone figured out. There’s nothing squarer than thinking inside of a box.

Introducing the second edition of Paingod and Other Delusions, his 1965 story collection, Ellison writes, “I’m the same as you: the deaths of a hundred thousand flood victims in some banana republic doesn’t touch me one one-millionth as much as the death of my dog did.” Ellison, in fact, is not the same as any of his readers, and much of his fiction — “A Boy and His Dog” included — celebrates those who recognize and claim their own uniqueness. Unfortunately, the celebration often turns smug. Vic knows himself to be an individual, but he puts this knowledge to a boastful and uninteresting end. Stuck in his adolescent fantasy, he murders Quilla June and expects thanks from readers and dog alike. A mature reader is likely to ask, “What else do you got?” But Vic’s pockets are as empty as his posturing.

Source: Cody Walker, Critical Essay on “A Boy and His Dog,” in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

What Do I Read Next?

• Ellison’s 1993 Mefisto in Onyx is a novel combining crime novel characters with supernatural elements. When a district attorney suspects that a convicted man is innocent, she persuades a man who can read minds to uncover the truth. Critics praise the book for its pace, originality, and characterization.
• Robert A. Heinlein’s classic science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a man brought up by Martians who arrives on earth as a foreigner. This Hugo Award-winning novel continues to intrigue readers with its plot, characters, and controversial topics.
• George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is a classic novel describing a dystopic future in a new region called Oceania. The main character, Winston, is in danger because he questions the all-powerful, all-seeing Big Brother.