Bunny

Bunny joins a wide canon of campus novels that satirize academia and explore its frustrations. This genre emerged in the 1950s and includes works like Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and Normal People by Sally Rooney. Campus novels frequently highlight how high school and college campuses can thwart creativity instead of cultivating it. In J.D. Salinger’s short novel Franny and Zooey (1961), Franny is somewhat traumatized by her unnamed, elite school and needs to get away from it. In Bunny, Warren College makes Samantha not write; likewise, Franny’s school makes her not act in plays. Bunny also references Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar. Plath’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is fascinated by violence, and not getting into a creative writing class propels her into a precarious space.

With the Bunny clique, Awad also draws on mean-girl tropes and clique narratives. Bully and popular clique narratives have dominated teen media for decades, and movies like Heathers (1989) satirize teen hierarchies through extreme violence. Many mean-girl stories are set in high schools. The Gossip Girl series (2002-2011) by Cecily von Ziegesar focuses on mean girls at an elite, private New York City high school. These stories are especially prevalent in TV and film, like Cruel Intentions (1999), the Gossip Girl TV adaptation (2007-2012), Pretty Little Liars (2010-2017), Euphoria (2019), and Yellowjackets (2021). Some of these influences appear implicitly or explicitly in Bunny, like when Tim Riggins, a character in Friday Night Lights, becomes the inspiration for a Draft.

Most mean-girl TV shows and movies occur in high school. Awad pushes the popular concept into graduate school, and the setting spotlights the issue of writing programs and their place within society. Awad satirizes faculty and students, specifically in creative writing programs. Many campus novels focus on writing programs, and many MFA graduates have mixed or negative feelings about their campus experiences. In “On Blowing My Load: Thoughts From Inside the MFA Ponzi Scheme,” MFA student Anelise Chen speaks favorably about her MFA experience but notes the common critiques: “Hack writers teaching more hack writers ad infinitum will lead to more accredited hack writers than the world can sustain” (Chen, Anelise. The Rumpus, 1 Oct 2010). In Bunny, Samantha sees “white people in black discussing grants they earned to translate poets no one reads from the French” (8), lampooning these “hack writers.”

The name for the workshop classroom, the Cave, advances the notion that college is separate from real society, a common campus novel characteristic. While “cave” calls to mind real caves, the name could reference Socrates’s allegory of the cave. In The Republic, Plato recounts this allegory, explaining how people who live in the dark lack a firm grasp of reality. Very few people in the novel, including Samantha, have a clear view of truth and fantasy. Like the people in Socrates’s cave, the students exist in a surreal space with their dubious creations.