The Scarlet Ibis Pride Analysis

📌Category: Books, The Scarlet Ibis
📌Words: 623
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 15 January 2022

Have you ever let pride control your actions? Well the protagonist of James Hurst’s “The Scarlet Ibis” did exactly that. Which led to Doodle’s, his brother, death. Everything that the protagonist does from helping Doodle to walk, to the coffin, and abandoning Doodle in the rain. It all leads back to his pride. We watch the narrator lose himself to his selfishness as he struggles to accept his brother. The narrator’s pride helps and hurts his brother. 

The narrator’s pride shines through in both his best actions as well as his worst. Doodle clings to his older brother even though the main character is ashamed of Doodle, being constantly forced to drag his younger brother along with him everywhere he goes. His pride has helped Doodle as well, Doodle’s physical progress came from the protagonist's determination of teaching Doodle how to walk. “They did not know that I did it for myself, that pride, whose slave I was, spoke to me louder than all their voices, and that Doodle walked only because I was ashamed of having a crippled brother” (6). 

With that pride the protagonist helped Doodle, in more ways than one. He gave him a sanctuary and aided Doodle with his physical progress. The sanctuary he gave Doodle was Old Woman Swamp, they even imagined growing old with one another and living with their parents there. “so I dragged him across the burning cotton field to share with him the only beauty I knew, Old Woman Swamp.” Eventually the protagonist set out to teach Doodle how to walk, after many weeks of practice at the swamp Doodle was able to stand on his own. “When he fell, I grabbed him in my arms and hugged him, our laughter peeling through the swamp like a ringing bell” (5). The protagonist was embarrassed of having a brother that couldn’t walk. He cared for Doodle but he could only think of what others would think. 

Being forced to drag his brother in a go-cart after him the narrator’s disdain for his young brother only grew. He continued to scare Doodle by telling him that they all thought he would die when he was first born. Forcing him to touch the coffin Doodle was meant to be buried in and threatening to leave him if he didn’t. Which built the foundation of Doodle’s fear of abandonment. “Doodle was frightened of being left. “Don’t leave me, Brother,” (4). The humiliation the older brother felt for Doodle only grew stronger as they got older, he started wanting to teach Doodle to do more than walk. He wanted Doodle to be able to run, swim, fight, and keep up with boys his age. He overworked Doodle and it ended up catching up to them. It started storming after Doodle had failed at Old Woman Swamp and they were heading back home. The faster the protagonist walked the faster Doodle went after him, with hopes of making Doodle run the protagonist started to run away from him. Abandoning his frail figure in the storm, “Brother, Brother, don’t leave me”(11)! Cruelty was rushing through his veins and he wanted nothing more than to fulfill his foolish ego. When the cruelty subsided he went back for his brother to find him huddled underneath a red nightshade bush, lifting his head Doodle crumbled right in front of his brother’s eyes. His disfigured body lay on the grass, bloody and fragile, the protagonist was devastated. 

The narrator’s pride helps and hurts his brother. But that pride ended up hurting the protagonist as well. The choices he made, each one more selfish than the next, eventually lead up to Doodle’s death. Teaching him how to walk, forcing the coffin onto him, and doing exactly what Doodle feared the most, abandonment. “There is within me (and with sadness I have watched it in others) a knot of cruelty borne by the stream of love, much as our blood sometimes bears the seed of our destruction” (4). Turns out the protagonist planted the seed of his own destruction.

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