The Ogre (Day 3)

2. Throughout The Ogre there has been several references to animals, for example when Tiffauges nurtured the pigeons. While in Rominten, however, he is instructed to kills the animals. He was given the role of slaughterer and even though he found it cruel “it was charged with meaning and therefore beneficient.” He almost fainted when he killed his first one by killing it with a “pistol shot behind the ear.” This shows the Gilles et Jeanne or Weidmann side of Tiaffauges that he often compares himself to. Instead of caring for animals and acting motherly to them he is killing them without the intent or even desire to eat them afterwards. Although he is given this new role, he is still deeply pained at the sight of the dead horse. On his way back from Goldap he encountered Aurochs, a prehistoric animal that Dr. Lutz Heck tried to crossbreed with bulls to try re-create the original aurochs. “The Master of the Hunt howled with laughter and slapped his thighs” at each new fact that Tiffauges told him about his encounter with the animals. “Then Tiffauges was chaffed about his glasses: perhaps the magnifying lenses had made him mistake some rabbits for giant bulls.” Tiffauges then realized the masters “hatred for men in glasses, who for them embodied intelligence, study speculation. In short, the Jew.” Here he is being referred to as a Jew. Tiffauges is under Hitlers’s control, but he is blind as to what is really going on around him. The aurochs could represent the Jews in a sense because the aurochs were domestic animals that were killed huge numbers that led to their extinction. Similarly, the Jews are being killed in huge numbers, as well.

3. Bluebeard serves as a mirror image for Abel. “For a while the pigeons of Rhine had been first his conquests and then his beloved children, it was really himself he was tending when he devoted himself to his horse. And it was a revelation, this reconciliation with himself, this affection for his own body…” (223). This horse represents Abel. They had to find a horse large enough to carry Abel and this one could carry three of him. This is similar to Abel because he likes to carry children. So when he says that it was himself that he was tending to when he took care of the horse, it is because the horse represents Abel.