52 pages • 1 hour read
The Painted Bird
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Afterword-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Afterword Summary
The Afterwordwas written in New York City in 1976, eleven years after The Painted Bird was published. Formatted in memoir fashion, it is a reflection on how the book came to be and on its reception.
In 1963, while Kosiński and his wife were in Switzerland, they met a group of wealthy Western Europeans who’d fled their countries before World War II. These now elderly exiles, having escaped the horrors of war, “knew the war only vaguely” and “believed that reports about the camps and gas chambers had been much embellished by overwrought reporters” (x). As a survivor of the war, Kosiński was troubled by the guests’ “hazy, unrealistic view of the world,” and believed fiction “could present lives as they are truly lived” (xi). To this end, he decided to write a novel; the book would be in English, as he hadn’t used his mother tongue since he left his homeland.
In his novel, Kosiński sought to explore “the individual’s relationship to society”—more specifically, “the essential anti-human condition” (xii). When The Painted Bird was first published, it contained little information about him, and he declined to be interviewed. He believed author background was a “thrust between the book and its readers,” and information about him “violated the novel’s integrity” (xiv).
Eastern European critics called the novel libelous, complaining that “references to folklore and native customs […] were caricatures of their particular home provinces” (xv). Kosiński was regularly attacked by countrymen who believed he’d “vilified their country and ridiculed their people” (xviii). He likens his attackers to the protagonist of his book, for he sees both as victims of government-fed prejudice. Western criticism tended to focus on the descriptions of violence and to suggest Kosiński “had exploited the horrors of war” (xx), but Kosiński argues that he was merely describing “the horrors” his parents “had found so inexpressible” (xxiii).
Kosiński received letters from students who were studying The Painted Birdand “perceived the world as a battle between the bird catchers and the birds” (xxvi). Members of ethnic minorities especially seemed to take to heart the message that “color, language, and education marked for life the ‘outsiders,’” who were “feared, ostracized, and attacked” by the “insiders” (xxv-xxvi). Nevertheless, the events following the book’s publication make Kosiński question whether he should have written the book at all. He compares the book to its persecuted protagonist, rejoicing in the fact that the book, like the boy, survives.
Chapter 1 Summary
The first chapter opens with a third-person omniscient narrator establishing context and background. In 1939, the parents of a six-year-old boy were going into hiding to avoid the concentration camps and, hoping to save their child, sent him to live in a distant village. A series of disasters then forced the boy to travel from village to village over the course of six years.
The boy and the villagers were alien to each other; the dark-complexioned boy didn’t resemble the fairer “isolated and inbred” (3) villagers, and they didn’t understand the boy’s educated language. The villages lacked schools, hospitals, paved roads, and electricity; the villagers “were ignorant and brutal,” and lived “in the manner of their great-grandfathers” (4). They tended toward superstition, feuding, and disease.
When the boy begins his first-person narrative, he describes his foster mother, Marta, who “was old and bent over” with a “withered body” that “constantly trembled as though shaken by some inner wind” (4). Her smell is “foul,” “bubbly saliva” drips from her lips (5), and she believes evil forces in her knotted hair make her senile.
The boy spends his time playing with the animals in the yard. He describes a pigeon that tries unsuccessfully to assimilate with the chickens before being killed by a hawk, as well as a snake that sheds his skin, inspiring Marta to explain how human souls shed their bodies before being judged by God.
When village boys set the boy’s pet squirrel on fire, Marta claims death “was lurking close by and trying to enter” (8), and when she grows sick, she blames her illness on the boy. She believes he casts spells that make her bread sour, and she orders him not to look into her eyes or count her teeth, lest these acts subtract years from her life. The boy sometimes grows nostalgic for his parents; however, images of his parents begin fading.
One morning, the boy is unable to wake Marta. Believing her asleep, he attempts to light a kerosene lamp and accidentally sets the house on fire. When farmers rush toward the scene, he hides, remembering Marta’s warnings that villagers would kill him. He falls asleep in a ravine and wakes up the next morning cold, hungry, and scared. When calling for his parents produces no response, he decides to walk to a village.
Chapter 2 Summary
The boy approaches a village with huts “sunk halfway into the earth” (15). The peasants stare warily at him and poke him with a rake as he cries for his parents. Laughing, they kick him and pelt him with stones, cow dung, and apple cores. He’s then shoved into a sack and brought to a farm, where he’s whipped. The farmer’s wife and children laugh at this. Though he doesn’t understand their language, he recognizes the word “gypsy.” He’s whipped again, given some bread, and locked in a dark closet infested with rats.
Villagers come to ogle him and watch as he jumps at the whip. Among them is Olga the Wise, who inspects him carefully and buys him from the peasant, leading him away with a string around his neck. Her hut is filled with ingredients for medicine making, such as grasses, stones, and frogs. The boy attends healings where Olga protects villagers from spells and performs (often painful) treatments on sores, ear pains, tumors, and decaying teeth. He helps her grind and mix ingredients. Despite the language barrier, they are able to understand each other.
Olga calls the boy “the Black One” and claims his black eyes show he is “possessed by an evil spirit” (20) whose stare could cast and remove spells. According to Olga, the evil spirit attracts phantoms and ghosts, and she gives him elixirs “[t]o restrain the desires of my evil spirit” (21). While he feels safe with Olga, when he ventures out alone, he is shunned and taunted by fearful villagers.
Plague ravages the village, and the boy tends to the sick alongside Olga. When he himself is stricken, Olga buries him to his neck in the earth and makes fires of peat to force the sickness out. A group of ravens circle him, pecking his head and pulling his hair; the boy resists at first but ultimately submits, feeling he’s “joined the flock of ravens” (25). Olga digs him out, and he recovers, Olga claiming “the disease was picked up by a throng of ghosts transformed into ravens” (26). One day, the villagers throw the boy into the water atop a catfish’s bladder, and the boy floats away. Terrified, he clings to the bladder until it bursts miles away from the village, leaving him alone on the riverbank.
Afterword-Chapter 2 Analysis
In the first two chapters, the reader is offered glimpses of the “purpose” laid out by Kosiński in the book’s Afterword: “to examine ‘this new language’ of brutality and its consequent new counter-language of anguish and despair” (xii). In The Painted Bird, Kosiński examines the horrors humans inflict on one another, especially on those perceived as different. He explains that by using a child to represent humankind “in his most vulnerable state,” and war to represent “society in its most deadly form,” he seeks to depict “the confrontation between the defenseless individual and overpowering society” (xii).
The scene in which peasant children set the boy’s squirrel on fire is an early example of this confrontation and foreshadows the violence humanswill perpetrate on each other throughout the novel. The animal world frequently reflects the human world. Marta compares her snake shedding its skin to humans leaving their bodies behind before being called to God. Similarly, before it’s killed by the hawk, the pigeon that attempts to integrate with the hens “was clearly unwelcome,” for the hens “looked at him with disdain” and “scurried away, frightened” (6), a rejection uncannily similar to that the boy experiences in his first village. Finally, when the ravens swarm the boy as he’s buried in earth, he capitulates, saying, “I was myself now a bird” (25). The comparisons between animals and humans remind the reader of the blurry line between non-animal humans and humans’ own brutal, animalistic nature.
The animal-human connections suggest not only human brutality, but also human ignorance. Marta embodies the peasants’ superstitions, especially in regard to the boy, whom she fears will count her teeth and subtract years from her life. Olga, for all her wisdom, casts spells and believes in evil spirits. Believing his dark complexion an indicator of evil forces inside him, the villagers abuse and shun the boy, ultimately tossing him into the river. In the introduction to the first chapter, Kosiński establishes that the villages were “[i]naccessible and distant from many urban centers” (4). The superstitious peasants, isolated from society, demonstrate the fear and xenophobia common to homogenized, undereducated populations.
It is worth noting that the boy is nameless. Kosiński, in the Afterword, implies that the child and the war are both symbolic. He also describes his desire for the book to be cast not as autobiography but as fiction, which enables the reader to draw on “[their] own experience” (xiv). Because the boy is anonymous, readers can imagine themselves in his shoes; the novel is about not one person, but about the capitalized version or idea of the Individual.
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