sentences:  Despite praising his dog, Mirbeau offers an unromanticized image of the predatory beast, whose displays of goodness and affection are offset by murderous rampages, his wholesale slaughter of sheep and chickens.Herein Mirbeau shows that man and animal alike obey the "law of murder", whose operation Mirbeau had described in "Le Jardin des supplices" ("Torture Garden").Decentering the masterful human subject who acts as a confident narrator, Mirbeau's novel shows how completely he had broken with the conventions of realist fiction.