NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
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 victim hood 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 meI 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 existence? (Myers, 2). However, being forced to? pass? as a Christian left him emotionally scared and he young Kosinski was not to follow his father?
s lead. Jerzy? s principal biographer, James Park Sloan, attributes Jerzy? s anti-communism to his dislike of conformity.
Judging by The Painted Bird I would say there is reason to accept such an assertion. However, Meyer, another reviewer, says that? his anticommunism seems to have been principled enough. His intellectual mentor was a dissident who believed that Marxist orthodoxy was destroying any possibility of Marxist humanism. Seeing that human values would never be restored to Poland as long as the Communists were in power? (Meyers, 2).
Thus, ? [Kosinski? s] first two books were contributions to the literature of anticommunism? (Meyer, 2). Thus, whatever the reason, it is obvious Kosinski was anticommunist and this is both subtly and not so subtly reflected in The Painted Bird. When the boy is taken in by the Red army it is one of the few positive caring experiences that the boy has during his journey. He is thoroughly inculcated with the Party ideology by the soldiers. Often times our hero says things such as: ?
If it was true that women and children might become communal property, then every child would have many fathers and mothers, innumerable brothers and sisters. It seemed to be too much to hope for to belong to everyone! ? (174). And, he would pray that he could become part of the communist regime. He would recount his virtues and stress his helplessness in his prayers. ? I was almost eleven now and I was mute. I also had trouble with food, which sometimes came up from my stomach undigested.
I surely deserved to become common property? (174). The boy soon detests the Nazis and looks up to the Communists. [I]roily, Party strength is bought with the same currency of ruthless evolutionary zeal used by the Nazi overlords who would exclude the boy. The price in human life can be high, for Party strength? lay in its ability to rid itself of those who, like a jammed or crooked wheel on a cart, impeded progress? (202)? (Granofsky, 261). His idealism is also used to show the simplistic naivete embodied in communist sentiment. The evidence for this is in the fact that after the child protagonist has adopted the Party ideology he becomes destructive.
He only seeks revenge and is taught to seek revenge by his communist army guardians. His friend causes the derailment of a train full of people riding to market in order to seek revenge for his injuries and the boy delights in the derailment and death of all the peasants. ? If it had not been for the bandage over my face and mouth, I would have smiled too? (223). The concept of revenge that he learned from the atheist Red soldiers had turned him into a heartless fiend.
When he is finally re-united with his parents towards the end of the novel, he is ruthless and disobedient. He breaks his baby brother? s arm because he is annoyed with him. He is kicked out of a movie theater and returns the next night to drop two bricks on the theater attendant from a height of three stories in the name of revenge.
Before he met the communist leaders and donned his miniature Red soldier? s uniform he was a complacent victim. Afterwards, though he was no longer a victim, he was a terror. Not part of the solution, he was part of the problem. ? He is oddly detached from the suffering of human beings? (Straus 139). A final theme which can be found in Kosinski?
s work is that of the universality of the hatred of the Nazis and its causes. So often when the word Nazi is mentioned it is tied in with the word Germany. One often hears of? Hitler and Nazi Germany? . It is not often that you hear of the effects that the war had upon places other than Germany and upon people who did not live in cities, but lived in remote woodland countryside areas. This is another focus of The Painted Bird.
Kosinski tries to show some of the secondary effects of the war on places like Poland. As Wiesel said in his review of The Painted Bird: Equally terrifying is the realization that what it describes took place in ordinary villages where ordinary men, women and children led their ordinary lives and to whom the war, more abstraction than reality, brought inconveniences but not serious upheavals. Their brutality had nothing to do with political decisions taken in Berlin; it was homebred eternal. (46). Kosinski? s work is? proof that Auschwitz was more a concept than a name? (Wiesel, 46).
his book is meant to de-centralize the atrocities of World War II. The horrors and atrocities didn? t just occur in concentration camps, the camps were only a symptom of a more widespread disease of bigotry and hatred for people who were? different?
throughout the world. The questions raised by Kosinski in The Painted Bird, regarding this theme, are best summarized by Elie Wiesel in the Forward to? The Courage To Care? (New York University Press; New York): In those times there was darkness everywhere. In heaven and on earth, all the gates of compassion seemed to have been closed.
The killer killed and the Jews died and the outside world adopted an attitude either of complicity or of indifference. Only a few had the courage to care. These few men and women were vulnerable, afraid, helpless what made them different from their fellow citizens? What compelled them to disregard danger and torture even death and choose humanity? What moved them to put their lives in jeopardy for the sake of saving one Jewish child, one Jewish mother? And what of ourselves?
What would we have done? Would we have had the courage to care? Who knows? We can only hope that our humanity would not have forsaken us.
I found The Painted Bird to be both disturbing, often causing me nightmares, and at the same time deeply touching. I feel it is an important contribution to Holocaust literature and that it offers profound insights as to the mentality of the people of Eastern Europe throughout World War II. It raises important questions and leaves some of them unanswered for the reader to ponder on his / her own. Could it have happened here? Could it happen now?
As Wiesel so eloquently stated, ? We can only hope that our humanity would not have forsaken us. ?
Free research essays on topics related to: women and children, seek revenge, father , world war ii, painted bird
Research essay sample on World War Ii Women And Children
