Turn the pages of any great book and you might find bats.
07.16.25
By Paul Hormick
Turn the pages of any great book, from Melville to the latest bestsellers like A Court of Thorns and Roses, and you’ll find bats. They usually appear during nightfall or a subterranean scene, as when bats and birds surprise Don Quixote when the comic hero approaches the mouth of a cave in Cervantes’ Renaissance masterpiece. Besides these underground and nighttime settings, writers also use bats as symbols or allusions. And bats sometimes aid in setting the mood of a scene.
In Lewis Carroll’s classic (and famously twisted) children’s story, Alice chases after a waist-coated talking rabbit, and follows him down his rabbit hole. Quick as a wink, the child is floating down, down, down. As she tumbles amid bookcases and other domestic splendors (and even snags a jar of orange marmalade as she drifts toward Wonderland), Alice thinks of her cat, Dinah, and puzzles over what Dinah might eat:
“There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but you might catch a bat. And that’s very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?” And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, “Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?” and sometimes, “Do bats eat cats?”
Of course, bats are not actually related to mice (and free-roaming cats do sometimes unfortunately kill bats), but Carroll is using the word “bat” in rhyming word play, which is an integral part of the fantasy and frivolity of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The author returns to silly bat rhymes later during the famous tea party. The Mad Hatter plays with the traditional nursery rhyme when he sings:
“Twinkle, twinkle little bat
How I wonder what you’re at!”
After Shakespeare (read Wherefore Art Thou Bats? to find out how the Bard brought bats into his plays), the writer who seems to have incorporated bats into his writing the most is James Joyce. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s semiautobiographical novel, the protagonist, Stephen Daedalus “felt the thoughts and desires of the race to which he belonged flitting like bats across the dark country lane.” Here, Joyce is using the erratic appearance of bats in flight to describe Stephen’s haphazard, youthful self-explorations as well as the status of his homeland of Ireland. At the time of this novel’s publication, 1916, Ireland was on the cusp of freeing itself from centuries of British rule and entering a time of great political and cultural uncertainty.
Joyce returns to this imagery later, using bats to represent the awakening awareness coursing through the mentality of Irish women, who suffer a heavier burden of gloomy isolation. He describes a female character saying, “She was a figure of the womanhood of her country, a bat-like soul waking to the consciousness of itself in the darkness and secrecy and loneliness.”
“She was a figure of the womanhood of her country, a bat-like soul waking to the consciousness of itself in the darkness and secrecy and loneliness.”
– James Joyce
Ulysses, which Joyce wrote during World War I, is recognized as one of the greatest if not the greatest novel in literary history. Bats enter scenes about a dozen times in the novel, including a bloody reference to bats and vampires that recur in some form or other all through the text. Joyce employs this use of repetition throughout Ulysses. And in several places in chapter 13, as dusk settles on Dublin, the author returns to a variation of “A bat flew here, flew there,” giving the approaching evening a spark of excitement.
In 1971, Hunter Thompson created an unexpected literary hit with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a recounting of his drug-filled journey to the famous gambling Mecca. In the opening pages of the book, soon after “the drugs began to take hold,” Thompson describes driving through the desert with his companion when, “Suddenly there was a huge roar all around us. And the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car.”
The gonzo journalist assumes that his companion, described in no more detail than being his attorney, will soon share his frightening visions. And when the attorney stops to pick up a hitchhiker, Thompson warns, “We can’t stop here. This is bat country.”
Of course, “bat country” could be anywhere and everywhere, as bats inhabit every continent except Antarctica.
The deserts that Hunter Thompson traveled are home to several species of pretty cool bats that aren’t scary at all (at least to humans).
And the deserts that Hunter Thompson traveled are home to several species of pretty cool bats that aren’t scary at all (at least to humans),like the pallid bat (Antrozous pallidus) that eats scorpions and the more than 15 million Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) who emerge from their migratory summer home at Bracken Cave in the evenings. Now, that’s a trippy sight!
Back to Thompson: Was this a drug-induced hallucination? Or, given that Thompson was well-known for fictionalizing supposedly true events to advance his story or better describe situations, the author may have created the scene as a harbinger of the erratic and even frightful events to unfold later in the pages of his countercultural classic. Little did he know, bats are not frightful at all. Must have been the drugs.
And what will future scholars say about bats in the literature of the early 21st century? What might they make of Azriel, Cassian, and Rhysand, the three “bat boys” who populate the popular A Court of Thorns and Roses? What significance does their bat-bromance have in this fantasy/romance series from author Sarah Maas? What do you think? Can you recall reading about bats in some of your favorite books and novels?
Paul Hormick, author of the environmental newsletter The Green Dispatch, has spent the last 22 years writing about music, food, and the environment.
