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Theme Of Pride In The Scarlet Ibis, By James Hurst

893 Words4 Pages

Pride is an amazing, horrible thing, A fork in the road that leads to two things, life and death. My parents always told me “Pride comes before a fall”. I never truly understood what that meant before I read this story it means that if you are too confident about yourself, something bad will happen to show you that you are not as good as you think you are. Pride is what the theme is in the story, “The Scarlet Ibis” by James Hurst. The story is about two brothers brothers who are very different. Doodle, the younger brother is very attached to Brother, his older brother, Brother is embarrassed of Doodle because has physical and mental problems that keep him from doing stuff that “normal” people can do. Brothers pride destroyed his relationship with Doodle by abusing Doodle, Forcing Doodle to learn to walk and swim when he didn’t feel safe doing so, and doing something that the doctor had said not to do, killing Doodle. …show more content…

Brother had sometimes flung Doodle out of the cart he carries him in. “I’d run with him across the ends of the cotton rows and careen him around the corners on two wheels. Sometimes I turned him over” (158). The point being that Doodle was being hurt from getting flung out of his cart. Brother also had plans to kill Doodle. “It was bad enough having an invalid brother, but having one who possibly was not all there was unbearable, so I began to make plans to kill him by smothering him with a pillow” (158). In other Words, Brother was so embarrassed to have Doodle as a Brother, he wanted him dead. Brother abused Doodle all because he was embarrassed for him to be his Brother, to the point of almost killing

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Doodles brother was embarrassed to have a not all there brother. It was very clear at the beginning of the book that the brother wanted doodle dead. His brother never wanted to be around him because he was scared to be made fun of. He wanted doodle to run and swim and play like all the other children

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Here is my evidence. First reason the narrator is guilty of Doodle’s death is because he was ashamed of him. This is clearly shown when brother makes the statement on page 347 “I was ashamed of having a crippled brother.” This clearly shows the narrator's shame in Doodle. Another statement

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Brother was at fault for Doodle’s death for pushing him too hard. Brother kept running in the rain and he left Doodle behind because he couldn’t keep up. Doodle and Brother were out practicing to make Doodle more normal.

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However, by trying to push doodle so hard the narrator's pride and desire to make Doodle into something he is not, ultimately leads to his tragic demise. The narrator's pride drives him to push his brother beyond his physical

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With that one of the biggest destructive forces is pride as seen in the story. It ended one's life and destroyed another. Brother was ashamed of Doodle, so he pushed him to the limit, and when the time came left him to die. Therefore Brother is guilty of murder in the case of Doodles

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The narrator didn’t really love Doodle, was cruel to him, and thought him how to stuff out of his own selfishness, so thank to the gift of pride, the narrator is guilty for the murder of his brother Doodle. The narrator despised Doodle. When Doodle was born and alive- against what the doctor said- the narrator says, "I began to make plans to kill him by smothering him with a pillow" (Hurst 345). The narrator wants to kill his brother because he realized he would not die and because of that, won't be able to do anything physically like brothers do together.

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His brother doesn't want to be embarrassed when he is with him so he sets out to make him well. When his brother makes him well he pushes him too much to the point where he keeps getting sick. Brother loves him very much but doesn't realize what he is doing is bad. Brother should show less pride towards Doodle and not let it get in the way of his love for him.

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He is ashamed of having a younger brother who can't walk, and he believes that if he can teach Doodle to walk, it will make him look better in the eyes of others. This prideful motivation leads him to push Doodle too hard, which ultimately leads to his death. Love is another theme that runs throughout the story. Despite

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Doodles brother was only helping him walk because he was ashamed of having a crippled brother but doodle's brother wanted doodle to walk so he can produce better everything so he wouldn’t be as badly crippled. “They did not know I did for myself, that pride, whose slave I was, spoke to me louder than all of their

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"Doodle!" I screamed above the pounding storm and threw my body to the earth above his. For a long time, it seemed forever, I lay there crying, sheltering my fallen scarlet ibis from the heresy of rain”(Hurst 6).This section shows from the end of Doodle’s life onward Brother has felt guilty. The whole story is Brothers story of the dangers of pride and his personal experience.

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At least this is what we see in the story. Throught, Brother strives to make Doodle a normal person. At the beginning, Brother and the family were sure that Doodle would be a good-for-nothing burden. When he was 6, he could not yet walk! This was a major antecedent to Doodles death.

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Brother planned to spend his entire life with Doodle, They "decided that when [they] were grown [they'd] live in Old Woman Swamp and pick dog-tongue" (Hurst). He wanted Doodle to have pride in himself and be able to do everything Brother wanted to do with him. Brother had pride in Doodle since he was first able to stand on his own and walk. He taught Doodle out of his own selfishness, he was ashamed of having an "invalid" brother and wanted to have "someone to race to Horsehead Landing, someone to box with, and someone to perch within the top fork of the great pine behind the barn, where across the fields and swamps you could see the sea" (Hurst). Brother was ashamed of the way he felt and his self-indulgent efforts for Doodle.

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“It was bad enough having an invalid brother, but having one who was possibly not there at all was unbearable, so i began to make plans to kill him by smothering him with a pillow. However, one afternoon as I watched him ... he looked straight at me and grinned.” Once the narrator attempted to kill Doodle, he realized that he couldn't . He didn’t kill his brother simply because he realized that Doodle was aware and he was “all there”, something that his family doubted him to be.

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At first the narrator sees Doodle as a crazy frail brother but as we move into the story, we can observe a lot of varying feelings brother has towards Doodle. Brother described Doodle as unbearable, an invalid brother, a brother who was not there at all, so he started

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“Pride is a wonderful, terrible thing, a seed that bears two vines, life and death” (Hurst 2). This is how James Hurst describes pride in his heart-wrenching short story, “The Scarlet Ibis.” What speaks to me most about this quote is its profound truth. For the majority of people, pride is either a positive or negative thing, but what Hurst and I seem to agree about is the fact that pride can be both. It is an undeniable symptom of the human condition, a tool that can either create or destroy, and is responsible for the best and worst parts of history.

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