Shiver

Shiver consistently depicts the characters’ inner conflict as a tension between human thoughts and emotions and base, animal instincts—an interplay exemplified in Grace and Sam’s first meeting. Early in the novel, Sam watches as some members of his pack drag Grace away from her backyard. The wolves converge upon Grace, “muzzles smeared with red” (3). Sam understands the desperation of his pack members to feed on Grace so they can survive, since their hunger is “an insatiable master” (3). For a moment, Sam wishes he too could ignore Grace’s human smells and sounds. Yet, when Grace looks at him, Sam feels he is “tearing apart, inside and outside” (4). He feels the pull between his wolfish instincts to hunt Grace and his immediate emotional connection to her, which the novel positions as distinctly human. Sam snarls at his pack, driving them away, empathy and love winning out over animal instinct. While Sam saves Grace in his wolf form, leaning into his human compassion, Jack gives in to his animal instincts when he bites Olivia in his human form. The novel suggests that werewolves wrestle with the tension between their base instincts and human emotions, attempting to balance their two sides.

The text positions the violence committed from animal instinct as amoral, necessary to survival. Sam admits to Grace that he killed and ate a cat for sustenance in his animal form. Grace herself argues that the wolves cannot be persecuted en masse for an attack, since most of them are wild animals who hunt objectively. Most of the wolves who commit deliberate violence in the text are those with violent tendencies as humans (often as a result of the violence inflicted upon them by others), such as Christa, Shelby, Salem, and Jack. The novel makes a clear distinction between the violence of animals to achieve survival or dominance and that of humans, which is often born out of cruelty or prejudice. Stiefvater’s portrayal of Jack and Isabel’s father, Tom Culpeper, whose house is filled with hunting trophies, reinforces the sense of human violence as a moral failing rather than an objective tool for survival. Similarly, Stiefvater frames the violent and abusive actions of Sam’s parents as misguided. The novel frequently exposes the irony that for all their fear of savage animals, humans are far more barbaric.

In the novel, the werewolf form epitomizes the interplay between animal and human states of being. Stiefvater represents the werewolves not as andromorphic animals (animals assigned human characteristics), but as beings that experience reality in a wholly different way. For instance, Sam tells Grace that as a wolf he doesn’t “think” or “speak” in the human sense. He communicates with other wolves using telepathic images and recognizes wolves and people through their scents. The scents have a bright, synthetic quality for Sam, as they do for Grace, who has a werewolf’s senses. Animal existence, bound by instinct and relatively unclouded by human emotion, has a freeing appeal, especially for characters like Grace and Olivia. However for Sam, that existence means distance from Grace, poetry, art, and self-awareness—the things most important to him. As Beck explains to Grace, being a wolf is “hell” for Sam as he needs conscious thought to feel alive (357). Sam’s werewolf state represents a complex paradox—an allegory for the dilemma of existence itself. Sam is caught between instinct and thought, his animal self and his human form. To move ahead, he has to acknowledge and accept both aspects of his being. Even when Sam permanently becomes a human, he must retain his impulsive, animal self to be wholly alive.