The Scarlet Ibis Setting Analysis

549 Words3 Pages

Reality’s Hardship on Life’s Unreal Expectations Written by James Hurst, the short story “The Scarlet Ibis” strongly emphasizes how the pride of Brother leads to unattainable and highly impossible goals, and how setting the highest goals can bring you down even further. Setting and trying to complete tremendous goals in a short amount of time is dangerous like when Brother urges, “School was only a few weeks away, and Doodle was far behind schedule...I made him swim until he turned blue and row until he couldn’t lift an oar,” giving the reader the view of Brother and his highly anticipated expectations which go over and beyond Doodle’s limits. Pushing over your boundaries, just a little bit over a long period of time, will help you to improve such as how Doodle was taught how to walk, but trying to take down these colossal objectives and …show more content…

In swimming, I can’t expect myself to swim like Michael Phelps in less than a month by swimming dead sprints six hours straight, but it would take small improvements such as having a healthy diet, good sleep, and improving my swim technique and implementing it when I start to feel tired, because that is where my technique and speed starts to progress. Completing minor achievable goals can lead to impatience and tempt you to making major objectives that you want great improvements on in the shortest amount of time, such as when Brother eagerly proclaims,”Once I succeeded in teaching Doodle to walk, I began to believe in my own infallibility and I prepared a terrific development program for him,”(Hurst 421) presenting the idea of Brother thinking he could make immense improvements on Doodle because Brother believed he was perfect just after teaching him to walk. Short-term goals will over time help you climb the ladder to your awaited prize, but the temptation of pride gets in our way to sidetrack us from these small tasks and mislead us to humongous objectives that we want