The desire to strip all representation from the naming process in order to construct a riddle is embedded in the desire to deconstruct literary language. In the night, the biggest one escapes from the corral.
The cowboys look for him all over the place, then see him at the top of a mountain, but fail to capture him again. When they go back to the corral, the rest of the herd has undergone a transformation.
Instead of several ones, there is only an eight, whose shape also represents a double zero. The book is illustrated by Dirk Zimmer, a German-born artist and writer. This article does not examine how the album was created but the synergy created by the symbiotic interaction of text and illustrations.
By playing with perception and nonsense in clever switches of words and digits, 1 Percival Everett asserts that our perception of the world is totally subtended to its semantic representation.
The group of hunters are the cowboys, who are not named. Two of them have black beards, the third looks rather feminine, has long straight hair and wears glasses. His appearance is a cross between a hippie and an intellectual. They all have ropes and one of them has a guitar. They appear only in the illustrations, and contribute to divert the reader from the story, as they are often playful, but function as witnesses of this strange search.
