In Samantha Hunt’s “Beast,” we are introduced to a narrator with some serious problems: her brother died, she doesn’t talk to her sister, and she’s recently slept with a man other than her husband. She also turns into a deer at night, but that really isn’t as important to the story as you’d think.
The story is told with about a 50/50 split between present-tense narration and flashback. I’m honestly not sure if “flashback” is the correct term to use, since the information is relayed to us in such a conversational manner. In the present, she tells us about reading newspapers and playing hooky from work and having conversations with her husband. The only interesting thing that happens to her in the present is the nightly transformation, but even then, she can’t leave the house. Deer don’t have thumbs.
In the sections where she tells us about the past, though, we find meaning in the present. We learn her general disconnect from other people has been a pattern in her entire life, from picking a boy at random (and later marrying him) to casually insulting her sister (leading to a rift that lasted for months, maybe even longer) to not realizing her brother had been missing for three days after he died. Her infidelity starts to seem inevitable once you look at her ongoing behaviors, and she even describes it as “an accident like a car crash” (59). These problems are solved once she becomes a deer.
As a deer, she is unable to see Erich. As a deer, she has a moment of real connection with her husband, wherein she learns they are fundamentally the same. As a deer, she finds a family, a herd, and feels a part of them, feels “swallowed up” (68) by them, in a way it seems she’s never felt before. In becoming a deer, she is not transformed into a monster. Instead, she is changed from a monster to something innocent, something precious, where she can belong to a group, with her husband, without feeling all the guilt she carried throughout her story. When given the choice between her old self and new, she “step[s] into the stream of beasts” (68).
I too was lost in the timeline but agree that she felt the most “pure” in her deer form. As I kept reading, I wasn’t sure who was the beast in the story. Was it her or the men she encountered. Towards the end, I was convinced it was the men based on their animalistic behavior in sexualizing a situation and causing discomfort not only to the main character but the female reader who is equally disgusted by such language.
It occurs to me, as I reread your post, that the “deer don’t have thumbs” line is also an echo of “The Metamorphosis” and Gregor’s efforts to open the door to his room.