The Dodo and the Bear: Stanley Elkin’s Encounters with the Animal

Abstract

Stanley Elkin’s The Dick Gibson Show and Searches and Seizures present two humanencounters with the animal – the former a dodo, the latter a bear. One encounter isviolent, the other sexual, but both provide an interpretation of interspecies encountersthat exposes the masks humans use to ignore the violence practiced on nonhumananimals. Most interpretations of Elkin’s animal encounters read the dodo or the bearas lenses through which to judge either the human protagonist or the human conditionin general, but an anthrozoological reading of the texts gives weight to the experiences of the animals and finds an argument for equivalency across species.