Summary
The narrator, a Labrador retriever mix named Enzo, begins the novel by talking about the limited ways in which, as a dog, he is able to communicate with people. He has to rely on gestures and expressions because he cannot use language. He blames his inability to speak on his large tongue, and through humorous context clues like this, it almost immediately becomes clear (without him saying it explicitly) that Enzo is a dog.
Enzo begins the novel in the present tense moment from which he is narrating, and we learn that he is facing an important life-or-death decision. On the one hand, Enzo loves his owner, Denny, and would do absolutely anything for him. He would never abandon Denny or do anything to willfully hurt the man who has given him such a beautiful life. But on the other hand, Enzo is an old dog, and he is suffering. His legs are weak, he has chronic joint pain, and, on top of all that, Enzo has been convinced by a documentary he saw about Mongolia that when he dies, he will be reincarnated as a human. And Enzo believes that he already is a human woefully trapped in the body of a dog. He understands language, he just cannot use it himself. So he is determined to use his limited powers of communication to convince Denny to bring him to the veterinarian and have him put down.
So as Enzo is beginning the narration of this novel, he is intentionally lying in a puddle of his own urine, waiting for Denny to return home. His goal is for Denny to find him and be convinced that he is in too much pain to continue living, but he is surprised (and a little scared) when his plan actually works. Denny returns home, finds him on the floor, and calls his co-worker Mike to cover his next shift. He plans to take Enzo to the vet the next day.
From here, Enzo tells the story of how he met Denny. He was bred on a farm in Spangle, Washington, by a dishonest breeder who told all of his clients that the dogs were shepherd/poodle mixes when really their mother was a Labrador, and their fathers were varied and unknown. Enzo suspects that his father was the fearsome terrier who hung out in the barn with the men and their tractors. He hopes he is related to this terrier, because terriers are problem solvers. When Denny comes to the farm, he immediately picks Enzo up out of the litter of puppies and asks to buy him.
Enzo and Denny live together as bachelors in a small apartment in Seattle for a year. Enzo grows from a puppy to a lanky, adolescent dog, and he and Denny develop a strong bond of trust. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Denny falls in love with a woman named Eve. Of course, Enzo’s first instinct is to be jealous of her, but he sees how important she is to Denny and realizes that he would have to get used to her presence. Enzo witnesses Denny and Eve being sexually intimate and begins to understand that there is a different kind of love that humans can feel for each other that he and Denny will never share.
This realization transitions to Enzo explaining his evolutionary theories as to why dogs are more advanced than monkeys, despite the fact that they lack thumbs. Enzo watches a lot of television during his days alone at home, and though Denny usually leaves it on the Speed channel because of his passion for racing cars, sometimes he switches it up to the History or Discovery channels. On these days, Enzo learns about wild animals and evolutionary biology, and these shows lead him to form some theories of his own.
His main theory is that the presence of the dewclaw (a vestigial digit above a dog’s regular paw) is evidence that dogs are supposed to have thumbs; Enzo believes that humans remove dewclaws and selectively breed dogs because they are afraid that if dogs had thumbs, their advanced evolution would threaten to overtake the human race as the dominant species.
Analysis
In these opening chapters, Stein immediately introduces the theme of communication, or in Enzo’s case, the limits of communication. The first word of the novel is “gestures,” and it is an important word for our narrator, because he cannot verbalize his thoughts. He must rely on actions and expressions, non-verbal cues, in order to communicate. This theme will eventually apply to the humans in the novel, who also communicate non-verbally, even when they can speak. For humans, this type of communication can be interpreted as a marker of intimacy, and as Denny and Eve’s relationship develops, we will see them rely more and more on gestures to anticipate each other’s needs.
We can see that Enzo’s thought process resembles the human thought process. He thinks with language and understands human conversations, and yet we’re not sure how unique this is to Enzo. Stein leaves it ambiguous as to whether Enzo is truly a man stuck in a dog’s body, or just a normal dog whose thoughts are being miraculously translated for the sake of the story, because the only perspective we have is through Enzo’s eyes. This ambiguity creates a tension between Enzo’s strong belief that he will be reincarnated as a man and the reader’s uncertainty as to whether there is any truth to Enzo’s theories. If this ambiguity didn’t exist and we were certain that Enzo was a somewhat supernatural being, then it would be easier to immediately accept that he is a man stuck in a dog’s body, and the stakes of his death would be considerably lower. Thus, Stein’s omission contributes to the novel’s suspense.
A lot of what Enzo learns about human communication he learns by watching television. The tradition starts with Enzo and Denny sitting on the couch and watching tapes of races. Denny works in an auto body shop as a customer service technician, but his real passion is racing cars. This titular concept of racing in the rain is introduced as early as Chapter 3, when in a short return to the present tense, Enzo describes watching a tape of a race after Denny finds him collapsed in a pool of his own urine. This short scene provides explication—we learn that Denny is a racecar driver and that he and Enzo share a passion for racing—and also introduces the theme of racing in the rain, which is loaded with more general themes like the ideas of maintaining control in moments of crisis, and anticipating and reacting to dangerous situations.
Another consequence of Enzo watching a lot of television is that he forms evolutionary theories about how dogs are more closely related to human beings than are monkeys. Evolution is a recurring theme in the novel, and Enzo’s misinformed theories have the dual effect of making him seem a) more human and b) less reliable as a narrator. Because of course humans are constantly coming up with improbable, unscientific, and unprovable theories to justify a version of reality that better suits their desires; but the fact that Enzo is susceptible to this inclination leads us to question the version of reality that he presents. For example, we might question whether he will actually be reincarnated as a human after he is euthanized.
These first few chapters set up the scope and frame, or structure, of the novel. By starting in the present tense of the narration and then slipping into a retrospective mode, the reader is made aware of Enzo’s situation as he is telling the story. We know that the narrative voice belongs to an old dog on the verge of being put down, which adds an element of urgency to his tale because he doesn’t have much time left to tell it. In other words, we know this may be the last story Enzo ever tells, and that alone adds significance to his words. We also may notice the absence of Eve from the scenes occurring in the present tense, which introduces the question of what happens to Denny’s family over the course of the novel. As for the structure, we know that Enzo is an old dog who lived a full life, and he begins the retrospective mode with a scene from his breeder’s farm, so we assume that the novel will span Enzo’s entire life up to the present moment of his narration.
