Bunny

“Behold the white people in black discussing grants they earned to translate poets no one reads from the French.”

Samantha uses imagery to illustrate the privilege and pretension of the Warren milieu. The white people represent entitlement, and her comment on their translations satirizes literary academia and plays with the criticism that it’s a Ponzi scheme. No one benefits from a Ponzi scheme that isn’t running it, and no one wants to read the translations but the translators.

“The Bunny invitation is still ticking in my pocket like a little bomb.”

Samantha uses a simile to link the Bunnies to violence. With a connecting word (“like”), she compares the invite to a bomb. The simile foreshadows the Bunnies’ violence and their union of violence and cuteness—the bomb is “little.”

“I feared they might be naked, reclined on whimsical furniture out of Alice in Wonderland. Or else in pastel lingerie, using Anaïs Nin erotica as fans. Massaging each other to the music of Stereolab. Obscure yet erudite porn projected on some massive screen.”

The cultural products highlight the hybridity of the Bunnies. They connect to the cuteness of Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories (and the 1951 Disney movie adaptation). They link to the sexual writings of Anaïs Nin, the indie band Stereolab, and they merge pornography with sophistication. The sequence of images reinforces the many parts that compose the Bunnies.