Mr. Bones' post-Willy experiences seem to have been written to show how good life with Willy was, something Mr. Bones never doubted. Mr. Bones, the reliable narrator, attests that the apparently drunken bum Willy is truly a good guy. King and Mr. Bones are loyalists of the homeless. They accompany, listen, caress, defend and most of all, shed their grace on their human friends. They exist, from a literary point of view, to confer innocence.
Innocence is a real thing, and the innocence of animals has genuine weight.
When the downtrodden are blamed for their suffering, it is legitimate to point to the children among them and ask what they have done wrong. But to draw an accurate portrait of an animal, if that is the writer's goal, you have to omit the halo. And for an animal biography to be a powerful story, there has to be more to it than a series of horrific blows suffered by an animal. Gowdy spent time in East Africa with elephant researchers, getting a feeling for elephants and where they live, and then she wrote this novel, creating a society of named individuals with customs, language, religion, oral history and an ornate mythology. She invented so much fictional elephant culture that the book brims with footnotes, enough for a Tolkien trilogy.