The Scarlet Ibis
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"The Scarlet Ibis'" is a tragic short story written by novelist James Hurst. It was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1960 and has since appeared in multiple high-school literature textbooks since the late 1960s.
[edit] Plot summary
The narrator's (also known as his big brother) younger brother, Doodle, was born an invalid who could only crawl. Time passes and Doodle becomes five. Despite loving each other, the elder brother obtained a sense of destruction and gave his brother tasks that could not be accomplished by someone like him despite warnings by the doctor. The narrator teached him how to walk out of embarrassment that his brother couldn't be normal. After weeks of hard practicing, Doodle learns how to walk, and the family rejoices. After a while the narrator, feeling infallible, decides to teach Doodle to walk, run, swim, climb trees,and fight. They go to the "Old Woman Swamp" to work. The brother set him a deadline for him to be like any other child and go to school. His grueling work shows little progress as the deadline he sets gets closer. Finally, after an encounter with a Scarlet Ibis dying, Doodle and the narrator set out to the swamp for one final attempt to yield results and Doodle fails. As a storm approaches they start to make their way back to the house. Angrily, the narrator begins to walk faster than Doodle. When Doodle falls behind, the narrator runs off leaving him. Soon he calms his anger and waits for Doodle, who doesn't show up. Walking back, he finds Doodle curled up next to a bush, dead and bleeding scarlet, which was exactly like the Scarlet Ibis.
Throughout the story the narrator is only referred to as brother. Doodles encounter with the scarlet ibis is very symbolic in this story. The narrator himself says "How many miles had it [the bird] traveled to die like this, in our yard, beneath the bleeding tree?". This is almost exactly how Doodle ended up dying, with everyone thinking that he would never live right from the start, and then no one believing that he would ever be able to walk. He had gone so far, only to die a tragic death, symbolized in the Scarlet Ibis's death. No one ever gave Doodle credit, they just thought he would die and never achieve the goals he had for himself.
Hurst says that there are three "characters" in the story — Doodle, the narrator, and the setting, which comments on the inner action. When asked about the meaning of the story, Hurst once replied, "I hesitate to respond, since authors seldom understand what they write. That is why we have critics. I venture to say, however, that it comments on the tenacity and the splendor of the human spirit."
Hurst won the Atlantic First Award for this story. He sold over 3 million copies of the story.
