Animal instinct

McTeague by Frank Norris is so awesome.  First of all we will start by talking about McTeague’s animal nature.  McTeague is the main character of this novel and he is a big brute of a man with blond shaggy hair and hands like meat hammers.  We first learn of his animal ways by seeing he has a routine when doing his job.  We see a full blown detailed occurrence of his sexual emergence.  When a woman named Trina comes see him since he is a dentist, this is his thoughts “… the sudden panther leap of the animal, lips drawn, fangs aflash, hideous, monstrous, not to be resisted, and the simultaneous arousing of the other man, the better self that cries, ‘Down, down’…The fury in him was as the fury of a young bull in the heat of high summer” (Norris 21).  Now really this is such a sexual innuendo and this guy is scary when it comes to his feelings.  Not only those he have these thoughts about his patient who is lying on the chair unconscious but he acts upon them and kisses the woman.  Norris is really good in playing with this animal personality that he keeps making this human a monster. 

McTeague becomes a creature as the novel progresses.  Each description hints that there is to be a major event that will make a monster and the human will not exist.  After McTeague marries Trina the unconscious patient and has been with her for a while he goes and beats her. Some animals kill or abandon their babies or each other when they have been touched by humanity.  In the case of McTeague we see that he kills Trina because she is touched by one of human’s sins, greed, and he himself has been touched by it.  Therefore his alcohol induced thought process is to get rid of which makes his life bad.