42 pages • 1 hour read
Andre AlexisFifteen Dogs
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Two Gifts”
Chapter Five follows Prince’s journey before and after Hermes bestowed human intelligence on him. Apollo becomes anxious that he will lose the bet and intervenes to ensure that Prince is unhappy at the time of his death.
Prince spent the first two years of his life in Alberta with Kim, the boy whose family adopted Prince. Kim encouraged Prince’s playful, intelligent qualities. When he grew up and moved to the city, Kim brought Prince with him. One day when they were out for a walk, Prince chased a squirrel and lost track of Kim, and another family eventually took him in.
The abstractness of language interested Prince from the beginning of his experience with consciousness. He recalled that “treat” meant biscuit, perhaps explaining why he took such “joy in language” (153). The dogs in the pack who feared Prince’s poetry did so because they could not clarify where Prince’s skill placed him in the hierarchy. His talent was clearly “different than the traditional canine ones” (154), and they could not assess whether this posed a danger.
In his exile, Prince found solace in “his pack’s language” (154), the one thing left to him with everything else lost. Over the years, he spent time with several families, never staying permanently with any of them, as they could be “unreadable or unstable” (159). Towards the end of his life, Prince chooses a solitary life of scavenging near the shoreline where dogs are typically on leashes, meaning Prince does not have to worry about these dogs attacking him. To cause him unhappiness, Apollo renders Prince blind so that he will have to leave the lake area in favor of returning to a human master who can care for him.
Prince begins the arduous journey, which requires crossing a busy intersection relying only on his smell and hearing. An optimist by nature, Prince empties his mind of everything but achieving his task to return to the family that had previously taken care of him, and they accept him into their home. Though he misses “his territory and his independence” (164), Prince finds solace in his memories and his poetry. His only worry is that his poetry will die with him, since he is the last of his kind. Wishing he had passed it on, he begins reciting his poems to the woman of the house, and she begins to recite them back to him. When Apollo next robs him of his hearing, though, Prince begins to lose hope. He stops eating and drinking, and eventually, the family decides to euthanize him.
As he is lying on the table, Prince feels “despondent about the loss of his language” (168), but then he recalls one of his poems. This reminds him of language’s beauty, and he feels grateful for having “been given a great gift” (168). It occurs to him that if it could happen to him, then “his beautiful language existed as a possibility, perhaps as a seed” (168) that could flower again. Prince feels ecstatic at the moment of his death, and Hermes wins the bet.
Walking alone through the city, Hermes reflects on “these strange creatures” (169) called humans. Hermes knows infinitely more about everything than they do, but they know one thing that neither Hermes nor any other god knows: death, which both “darkened their pleasures and lightened their despair” (170). Hermes feels deeply for humans. He has power over them, but he also loves them.
Hermes decides to reward Prince “for his artistry and his unwitting service” (170). As his soul leaves his body, Prince experiences a moment of consciousness. He is back in Alberta running across a field, and he hears Kim call for him. Prince understands Kim as he never did before. Prince understands, during “his final moment on earth,” that he loves and is “loved in return” (171).
Chapter 5 Analysis
Throughout the novel, Prince remains adaptable and physically unthreatening. He embraces consciousness and accepts his hardships without complaint. Narrating Prince’s full biography in the book’s final chapter suggests that he is the fulfillment of Aristotelian virtues: He possesses good judgment, wisdom, honesty, bravery, and a sense of proportion, and he receives good luck when he needs it most. These culminate in his happiness at the time of his death.
Chapter Five further delves into why most of the pack target Prince for death, despite his being accommodating and willingness to let others dominate him. His poetic skills provoke confusion, frustration, and resentment in the other dogs because it is clearly a special skill that is “beyond the canine” (29), thus impossible to account for. His “play with language” in Chapter One is “an affront to clarity” (28); Chapter Five reveals that “clarity” means the canine language of domination and submission. Prince’s small size makes him easy to dominate physically, but his poetic skill elevates him, leaving the dogs confused about what role to assign him.
Like the Odyssey’s Odysseus, Prince does not perseverate on the unfairness of his hardships but remains calm and problem-solves, a pattern that repeats throughout his life. After he loses Kim, he finds another family. After the pack exiles him, he comforts himself with language. When Apollo robs him of vision, he returns to humans and attempts to transmit his poetry orally, which is also how pre-literate ancient societies transmitted their poetry. When Apollo robs him of his hearing, Prince momentarily loses hope but recovers by recalling one of his poems. He received the capacity for poetry as a gift, but the capacity for poetry exists in the world independently of him.
If the gift of poetry could happen for Prince, then it could happen again for someone else, and this ultimately is more important to Prince than whether his own poems survive. What matters to Prince is the capacities for beauty and joy through language. This demonstrates his wisdom and sense of proportion, both of which require a degree of humility. His sadness at the loss of his language was not self-aggrandizing but a product of his recognition of language’s power to create beauty.
