Rats in Happy-Go-Lucky: Symbols of Decay and Urban Neglect
Where Rats Appear in the Collection
In Happy-Go-Lucky, rats make their most significant appearance in Chapter 11, “The Vacuum,” during Sedaris’s account of the early pandemic in New York City. As the city empties and services cease, Sedaris walks deserted streets at night and encounters a man with a black eye, rats, heroin addicts, and a clown. The rats are one element in a catalog of what surfaces when normal urban life pauses.
The matter-of-fact listing is characteristic of Sedaris’s observational style: he notes the rats as part of the landscape, neither dramatizing nor moralizing about them. They appear alongside other figures of urban marginality, all sharing the same nighttime streets that have been temporarily ceded by the city’s human inhabitants.
The Context: A City in Suspension
“The Vacuum” describes February and March 2020. Sedaris travels to South America and has his temperature taken in Santiago. On the return flight, passengers wear masks. By March, his Manhattan grocery store is overwhelmed by panic buying; toilet paper, food, and vodka vanish. His own hoarding attempts fail, yielding odd items like steaks, coconut, buttermilk, taco shells, almonds, anchovies, and hot dogs.
As the city empties, services cease. Sedaris walks deserted streets at night—and it is in this context that he encounters the rats. The chapter’s title, “The Vacuum,” suggests both the emptiness of the city and the absence left by the pandemic’s disruption of normal life. The rats appear in this vacuum, emerging into visibility when the human systems that normally keep them hidden—sanitation, traffic, crowds—pause.
The chapter also recalls Sedaris’s father’s stockpiling during the 1973 oil crisis, connecting the pandemic hoarding to a family history of scarcity anxiety. This generational context adds depth to the rats’ appearance: they are part of a landscape shaped by fear, scarcity, and withdrawal.
What the Rats Symbolize
The rats function as a symbol of decay and urban neglect. Their presence on deserted streets suggests what happens when the systems that normally sustain a city—sanitation, commerce, transportation—fail or pause. The rats are not aggressive or threatening in the text; they are simply present, part of the landscape of a city temporarily abandoned by its human inhabitants.
The rats also connect to the chapter’s broader meditation on mortality. The pandemic is a mass-death event—Sedaris notes over 900,000 deaths by the end of the chapter. Rats, as creatures traditionally associated with death, disease, and decay, fit this thematic register. Their emergence on the streets is a visual reminder of what the pandemic has exposed: the fragility of urban life and the thinness of the systems that sustain it.
The rats also function as a contrast to the human panic depicted earlier in the chapter. While humans hoard toilet paper and vodka, the rats simply continue their scavenging existence. There is something almost comic in this contrast—the rats are more adapted to the crisis than the humans are. This fits Sedaris’s comic sensibility, which often finds humor in the gap between human pretension and animal reality.
Connections to Themes
Pandemic as societal lens: The rats are part of the pandemic’s revelation of what lies beneath normal urban life. When the city empties, the rats emerge—a reminder that the human world is built on top of other forms of life and that the boundaries between them are permeable. The pandemic, in this reading, is a lens that exposes the fragility of the systems humans take for granted.
Aging and mortality: The chapter’s reflection on mass death connects to the rats as symbols of decay. The rats are a memento mori—a reminder of mortality that appears when the city’s usual distractions are gone. This theme resonates with the collection’s broader treatment of aging and death, particularly in the chapters dealing with Sedaris’s father’s decline at Springmoor and his eventual death.
Self-image and transformation: The rats appear during a period of transformation—the pandemic has changed Sedaris’s routines, his relationship to the city, and his sense of normalcy. The rats are part of the new, strange landscape he must navigate. Their presence marks a moment of dislocation and reorientation, echoing the collection’s broader interest in how people change—or fail to change—under pressure.
Performance and audience: Sedaris is fundamentally an observer and performer. His nighttime walks through deserted streets are a form of material-gathering—he encounters the rats and other figures and later turns them into story. The rats are part of the raw material of his observational comedy, the strange details that make his essays distinctive.
Study Questions
1. Why do the rats appear specifically during Sedaris’s nighttime walks in “The Vacuum”?
The rats appear when the city has emptied and services have ceased. Sedaris walks deserted streets at night—a time and place where rats would naturally be more visible. Their presence is part of the chapter’s catalog of what emerges when human activity withdraws: rats, heroin addicts, a man with a black eye, a clown. The rats symbolize the decay and neglect that the pandemic exposed in urban life.
2. How do the rats connect to the chapter’s treatment of mortality?
The chapter ends with Sedaris noting over 900,000 deaths from COVID-19. The rats, as creatures traditionally associated with death and disease, appear in the same chapter as this mass-death statistic. They function as a visual symbol of decay—a reminder of mortality that surfaces when the city’s normal rhythms pause.
3. What does the rats’ presence suggest about the relationship between human and non-human life in the city?
The rats’ emergence on deserted streets suggests that the human city is built on top of other forms of life. When humans withdraw, rats and other creatures become visible. The rats are not presented as threatening—they are simply part of the landscape of a city in suspension. This suggests a permeability between human and non-human worlds that is normally hidden.
4. How do the rats function in Sedaris’s observational and comic framework?
Sedaris is a performer who turns his observations into material. The rats are part of the strange nighttime tableau he encounters—rats, addicts, a clown, a man with a black eye. These figures are the raw material of his comedy: the absurd, unsettling, and revealing details of urban life. The rats are not the subject of a joke, but they are part of the surreal landscape that Sedaris later renders into story.
For more on the collection’s treatment of these ideas, see the book overview, the pandemic-as-societal-lens theme, the aging-and-mortality theme, and the self-image-and-transformation theme.