George’s eyes began to glow at the sound; he bared his teeth. His throat tightened; it was as if he himself were sheltering something that he had to howl out now, along with this fellow creature.
-- Narrator (chapter 1)

Importance: This is George’s response to “a howling that sounded like nothing an ordinary human voice could have produced. But it wasn’t an animal’s howl either” (39). Pelzer’s howl echoes Beutler’s cry of agony, earlier in the day; a “thin barking sound [which] couldn’t have been a dog, but wasn’t a human voice either. For probably the person they were dragging off now had nothing human left in him” (15). Through these descriptions, the novel emphasizes the liminal state of the fugitives, between man and beast. The images all interconnect, with the villager’s likening of the runaway to “a rabid dog” (“coming into a decent village on a...