Varieties of the Fantastic in Fiction

While a woman may turn into a deer in Samantha Hunt’s short story “Beast,” that is not what the story is about. Rather, it is about a woman and her internal struggles with her domestic life. In the early pages of the story, we learn that the narrator and her husband were high school sweethearts. Hunt writes:

We went to high school together and married a few years after we graduated. I am lucky. I made a good decision by accident. In high school we chose boyfriends blindly, pin the tail on the donkey. I thought he was handsome and that was about all I thought. So I was surprised to find, after we’d been married a few years, that my husband was someone I really love. (50)

However, it soon becomes evident that the narrator must not be completely satisfied with her life, as she cheats on her husband with a man she meets at a nightclub:

In an evening filled with that many details there wouldn’t have been time for me to meet Erich, or whatever his name was, in the line for the bathroom. There wouldn’t have been time for him to follow me into the ladies’ room, where, with his hand up my shirt, he started biting my neck and chest like he was lost in some fever, like he was going to eat me with his lips that were thick and filled with blood. (58)

It is after this affair begins that the narrator begins turning into a deer. This, paired with some of the violent language as seen in the previous quotation, suggests to me that she seeks a sort of wild, feral freedom to her life. 

This can also be seen in her feelings about Pete, his daughter, and his deer. She states,

Maybe Pete just thought, Well, I’m no better than this deer, am I? I don’t know what happened to the deer, but Pete is dead now so I feel like I can say it here under the covers with my husband still asleep: I always thought there was something romantic about the way he named the deer after his daughter. Even if it was messed up. (57)

It is messed up, but it is something shocking and against the norm, something the narrator craves for herself.

By having the narrator turn into a deer at night (the time of day in which many people tend to think about their secrets and desires), Hunt allows her character to explore these feelings without having to directly state them. Readers can also see that the narrator is not the only one who feels this way because it is revealed that her husband also turns into a deer, and together they go out into the night with a large herd of deer.

My husband steps forward again and I follow him right up to the edge of the deer. His antlers have eight points. I tell myself I’ll remember. I’ll find him or hope he will find me, or maybe being found won’t matter when we are animals. I step forward and then i step forward again, closer to the deer. I feel the warmth of that many living things. I feel their plainness rising up to swallow me. I step forward into the stream of beasts. (68).

With this closing paragraph, we can feel the narrator’s anticipation of joining these so-called beasts, especially now that she knows she is not alone in her desire. If the other deer are to be interpreted as other humans who transform at night, this further strengthens the idea that everyone desires a sort of freedom that they may not have in day-to-day life.