The Significance of Dogs in Literature

Anna Heyward is the author of Living with Freddie: How a Dog Taught Me to Be Human, out September 8th from Random House. Below, she discusses the significance of dogs in literature. (Photo credit: Anna Heyward) I often find writing about the significance of dogs in literature to be difficult, because animals in literature are almost always used as a way of talking about the human beings around them. I get it. Animals are lively and interesting, and, helpfully, they don’t speak for themselves, at least not in ways we tend to understand, so they’re great for providing useful metaphors or embodiments for ideas we want them to carry. Most writing about animals is actually about how we experience our own observations of animals; what we think their behavior means, or how we might feel if similar things happened to us. It’s really hard to avoid, but it’s also deeply understandable. Our own experience is what we have to try to understand things. To see animals discussed for the sake of themselves, we usually have to turn to the science books, and if you want to look at the other side of it completely, and think about how animals live their lives and what being alive is like for them, I re...