Historical Analysis Of The Painted Bird Essay

, Research Paper

Jerzy Kosinski.s The Painted Bird is a tragedy narrated by a young boy with dark

hair and eyes who is abandoned in eastern Poland, at the outbreak of World War II. He

travels from village to village throughout the war years, occasionally protected, but more

often terrifically abused by the local inhabitants, due to their ignorance, superstition, and

fear of recourse from the Nazis. .He seeks asylum in huts and farms and, everywhere he

is exposed to murder, rape, sadism, sodomy, incest, and the spells of half-human peasant

crones. (Straus,139). The peasantry accuse the boy of being a Gypsy or a Jewish

founding and thus justify his victimization. He .witnesses atrocities which become literally

unspeakable when he is shocked into dumbness.(Granofsky,256). Ironically, our nameless

protagonist is a .forlorn Christian child of good Christian parents.(Wiesel, 46) who have

sent him away, hoping this will offer him the best chance at survival if their own anti-Nazi

efforts are detected. This narrative highlights three historic themes.

One predominant theme is the historic domination of the strong over the weak.

Via the victimization of Kosinski.s protagonist by the villagers, Social Darwinism is

thoroughly explored, and condemned. Granofsky eloquently examines the role of Social

Darwinism in his review of Kosinski.s work. He explains that the atrocities suffered by

our young hero are a direct result of . Nazi racial policy, which in effect, takes to an

inhuman extreme the linearity of Darwinian evolutionary theory, the concept that life on

earth is evolving in a unidirectional and unending way toward higher forms.(257).

The horrors of the Social Darwinism are compounded by Kosinski.s telling of the

story through the eyes of one of its victims. By having that victim be an eight year old

child, Kosinski evokes further feelings of sympathy from his reader. The child is innocent

and pure, his life prior to the start of his victimization, revolves around his nurse and his

.good Christian parents.. He can not have done anything to deserve the treatment he

receives at the hands of the villagers. His victimhood can only be seen as a direct result of

his weakness coupled with the color of his skin, hair, and eyes.

To make matters worse, he is a victim of mistaken identity. He is not a Gypsy or a

Jew as the villagers accuse him of being. He.s an abandoned Christian child who.s .dark

complexion [is] his misfortune. (Wiesel, 46). Wiesel continues, .Had his hair been blond

and his eyes blue, this memoir would not have been written. And this is precisely what

makes it so significant and so tragic….(46). Sadly, Wiesel is precisely right.

Further, the child is very impressionable and has a good heart. At least in the

beginning, he wants what is best for society. This serves to tug upon the reader.s heart

strings as the boy accepts his condemnation as a necessary part of his having been born .a

black flea. with dark hair and eyes, and accepts his life as detrimental to others.

He looks up to the Nazis, because he has been told all his life of their extreme

power. He has internalized the hatred of the villagers for his dark skin and eyes. Often he

expresses this internalized hatred in passages, such as the following, in which the boy has

been captured by a German officer who is about to decide his fate:

The officer surveyed me sharply. I felt like a squashed caterpillar

oozing in the dust, a creature that could not harm anyone yet aroused

loathing and disgust. In the presence of his resplendent being, armed in all

the symbols of might and majesty, I was genuinely ashamed of my

appearance. I had nothing against his killing me…I placed infinite

confidence in the decision of the man facing me. I knew that he possessed

powers unattainable by ordinary people (114).

Passages such as this are found throughout the book and I was discussed as I read them.

However, the expression of the protagonist.s internalized hatred serves well in persuading

readers that the Darwinian ideals the boy has acquired are perverse and wrong.

A second theme which appears throughout the novel, but primarily in the second

half is Kosinski.s anticommunism. This theme is particularly hard to discuss since his

criticism of the Communists is mainly sarcastic. He does a good job however of using the

boy.s innocence to mock the ideals of communism.

Kosinski.s anticommunist sentiment comes mostly from his childhood. His father

was a strong supporter of the .reds., the soviet communists. His family spent the war

passing as non-Jews in Poland. .Jerzy was carefully instructed to deny he was Jewish if

challenged. It was a lesson that took a lifetime to unlearn. (Myers,2). After the war his

father.s support was honored with a Party appointment, when the soviets moved in

(Myers). .For Jerzy his father.s position meant a superficially trouble-free postwar

exist

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