Max Porter's Grief Is The Thing With Feathers

Max Porter’s work, Grief is the thing with Feathers, is a novel despite being written in verse as there is a clear development of characters, passage of time and a progression of the plot.
The three narrators in the story each experience growth, which is a major indicator that a work is a novel, however the character that sees the most significant development is the father. The father begins the story enveloped in grief, unable to focus on anything else. After spending years grieving with the help of the crow, the father is finally, eventually, able to begin a new relationship. He meets a woman at a symposium some years later and brings her home. He describes the experience as “good, and she was lovely” (95) but he also “felt nervous about

One of the three main narrators, the boys, begin the story as just that, children. They begin the story as young boys simply struggling to navigate their lives without their mother. However, by the end of the story, the boys have grown into men with families and children of their own who are no longer hindered by their grief. The boys are counseled by the crow to learn to manage their grief and as that chain of events is taking place and time is passing by, the boys are healing. At one point, one of the boys tells a story of himself years after the story first began. He begins by saying, “once upon a time I am a grown up, I have a child. And a wife. And a car. I sound a bit like Dad” (101). He continues on to describe his “family friend” the crow and fondly remembers the times they had together. The time that passed and the events that took place in the boys lives, specifically involving the crow, he believes were something “more or less healthy… We miss our Mum, we love our Dad, we wave at crows” (102). The boys have clearly grown up, both physically and emotionally, since the story began, indicating that a substantial amount of time and important events have passed making Grief is the thing with Feathers a

The boys and their father, at first, are debilitated by the grief that they feel following the loss of the family’s matriarch. Their entire world is consumed by sadness and the crow is always there, reminding them of their grief. The father describes his feelings during the time right after her death saying, “I sat alone in the living room wondering what to do… waiting for shock to give way, waiting for any kind of structured feeling to emerge from the organisational fakery of my days. I felt hung-empty” (4). Although the father is engulfed in grief at that specific time, he eventually, with the assistance of the crow, learns how to live his life with the grief without allowing it to control him. The father and the boys are able to learn that grief never truly disappears but the feeling of helplessness (like the father was feeling), can. Grief can be managed. The managing of grief is best exemplified by the father when he concludes that, “grief is a long-term project” that one should not rush (99). His understanding of grief as a lifelong process is exactly the theme that the author is attempting to communicate to readers of his novel, Grief is the thing with