The stories “Beast” and “Fatso” have many similarities. These stories can be related because both present characters whose physical appearance changes at night; however, there is also the shared theme of an internal confusion or unhappiness within the protagonists.
At the beginning of “Fatso,” the speaker is explaining how his girlfriend seeks self-validation:
I’m a whore, they always wind up saying. And you hug them and say, no you’re not. You’re not. And if they don’t stop crying all you can do is say shhh. It’s something really terrible, she insists, as if she’s picked up on how nonchalant you are about it, even though you’ve tried to hide it. In the pit of your stomach it may sound terrible, you tell her, but that is just acoustics.
As a reader, I began to grow tired of the girlfriend after the first few paragraphs, leading me to believe the speaker feels the same way. However, the reader is soon introduced to this short fat guy at night (that his girlfriend turns into) who seems to be really fun to hang out with. This makes one think that the speaker enjoys spending more time with the short fat guy instead of his girlfriend because he is deeply unhappy in his relationship and finds her to be needy and annoying.
Although “Beast” isn’t exactly the same, there is still an internal and emotional conflict with the protagonists. Readers see the main character not only struggling with the death of her brother but with the fact that she is cheating on her husband with Erich. On page 60, she says, “Huge lips and watery eyes. That’s all I ever dreamed. Erich told me, like a cut in my ear, “I’d fuck you to death,” and for the past five days I’ve been hearing him say it over and over again.” And on page 61 she then states, “I’ll tell him. Any minute now I’ll say it. ‘Imagine what is it like to have opposable thumbs, to have them bone up into hard hooves. It was scary at first,’ I’ll say. How do you think deers open doors?”
The main character turning into a deer and explaining it to her husband could potentially be a symbol of her affair with Erich and how she wants to be honest with her husband about it. There is also irony in this reading as well because, on page 65, she says, “Just because something has happened doesn’t mean it will continue to happen and then he will think I’m crazy and then he will call some girl we knew in high school, one who doesn’t have problems like this.” This is incredibly ironic because she has cheated on her husband already, and she is still concerned about him talking to another woman. Also, it shows the reader that the protagonist is incredibly insecure, which makes one think that the deer can be a symbol of fragility.