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Imagination in literature
Essay on the suspense
The birds daphne du maurier full text
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Recommended: Imagination in literature
In today’s society, individuals have the need to feel superior in situations where they do not necessarily comprehend the circumstances. In order to have a sense of normality, they make up explanations to compensate for their lack of knowledge. The characters in Daphne Du Maurier’s “The Birds” take on this style of thinking when a plethora of birds mysteriously appear in the sky. The main character, Nat, warns his family and neighbors of the deadly potential of the birds which was demonstrated to him one afternoon. Once the birds begin to attack, Nat and his family must proceed to protect themselves. With reason and logic thrown into the air, the characters in the story fill themselves with false confidence in order to convince themselves that …show more content…
Throughout “The Birds,” the suspense in the story is used to portray the tendency for people to lose all reason in situations that are extremely complex. "[Du Maurier] forces Nat and the reader to remain in a claustrophobic house where all they can do is sit, listen, and wait for the inevitable terror that’s certain to return" (Kattelman 13). Not only is the point of view restrained to Nat, but it follows all of his actions, thoughts and inner monologue about survival. As a second-hand witness, the reader experiences all of the anxiety and anticipation he experiences. As soon as Nat checks for survivors, he witnesses that "[t]he line was dead. He climbed onto a bank and looked over the countryside, but there was no sign of life at all, nothing in the fields but the waiting, watching birds" (Du Maurier 97). After the attack of the birds, the surrounding area is completely wiped out. The suspense of being alone creeps into Nat 's head as he takes off to work on his house. The isolation drives him crazy because he does not know how to deal with it. Just like Nat, humans make decisions based off of what is real to them. Psychologically speaking, when reality becomes questionable, all familiarity and comfort with the situation go away due to people 's loss of power in knowledge (Kattelman 12). When the characters of "The Birds" are forced to confront …show more content…
In each of her characters, Du Maurier shows the explanations they came up with in order to avoid accepting reality. For Trigg, his explanation got him killed due to its irrationality. In Nat’s life, his justifications had him feeling so restricted that he dropped all the rationality to it, and embraced insanity in order to survive. By the virtue of suspense, isolation made the people of Cornwall lose their minds due to them not being able to feel comfortable in their own homes. Finally, the birds themselves represent paranoia and false assumptions people made in the Cold War. Unlike the explanations displayed in this story, not all justifications are bad. Only when they are exclusively used for situations that do not need them, do they become problematic. In cases like so, it is best to accept a problem for how it is rather than assuming the details. The public’s need to provide explanations for unknown situations is part of human nature. As fascinating as it might be, humanity will never truly stop this habit. In the end, society’s need to label the unknown will end up consuming them if not
In the narrative poem “Cautionary Tale of Girls and Birds of Prey” the author, Sandy Longhorn, tells the story of a young girl who is afraid of a hawk, and her inconsiderate father who doesn’t take her concerns seriously. The story shows how her father is determined to get rid of her fear of the hawk, because he thinks it is both foolish and childish. The daughter very well knows the capability of the hawk, however her father doesn’t acknowledge it until it is too late. In the poem, Longhorn uses alliteration and rhyme to help explore the theme of how being inconsiderate towards others can in the end hurt you as much as it hurts them. The poem takes place on a little farm where the girl and her father live with all of their livestock.
In his poem “The Great Scarf of Birds”, John Updike uses a flock of birds to show that man can be uplifted by observing nature. Updike’s conclusion is lead up to with the beauty of autumn and what a binding spell it has on the two men playing golf. In Updike’s conclusion and throughout the poem, he uses metaphors, similes, and diction to show how nature mesmerizes humans.
I thought of the reading as just another environmental writing trying to bring light to extinction of a species of bird. Then once I sat down a few nights ago I read the passage and I started to tear up reading about these poor birds brutally hunted. I started to feel the same emotions as Stratton-Porter did when she saw the bag of birds at her neighbor’s house. What really shocked me about how these birds went extinct. No one else saw them as Stratton-Porters father did, biblically. Her father told the other men in their neighborhood about how killing off the quails were bad for farming. Stratton-Porter states, “These things he studied out and began to pass along to his neighbors, even to put in his sermons that he preached in the pulpit” (196). Towards the end, I really enjoyed with how Stratton-Porter saw the wild pigeon after they were thought to be extinct, with a price for its capture and had no desire to disturb the bird. Stratton-Porter states, “So here I was looking with all my soul at one specimen of a bird bearing on its head a price ranging from one hundred up, with no way and no desire to capture it” (204). The very last part of this piece blew me away by the emotion wave I got feeling the bird voicing his thoughts. With the extinction of the passenger pigeon, there has been conservation movements to protect the wildlife and there habitat from
As part of her initiation into the sorority, Millicent is told to ask each passenger on a bus what they ate for breakfast. Most people answer very typically, while peculiar old man says that he ate “heather birds’eyebrows on toast.” He then explains to Millicent that heather birds are mystical purple birds that are free to be as they are. This man doesn’t care that he might be seen as strange for saying these things. He is very content with himself and the things he says. Even the man’s appearance is one of individuality. He “looked something like a gnome or a cheerful leprechaun. ” The conversation between Millicent and the old man takes place on a city bus. Most people would not appear to be cheerful and approachable when riding city transit, but this man is comfortable with expressing himself and does not feel the need to act like everyone else. He eagerly and readily tells Millicent about the heather birds, and how he too wishes to be mythological one day. Much like the heather birds, the old man is different from others. The man is the true representation of individuality in this story. The man’s openness with his individuality made Millicent think that perhaps all the ridiculous questions she was supposed to ask as part of her initiation were nothing to be embarrassed about. The man’s tale of the
Mrs. Wright, however, justified killing her husband due to Mr. Wright trapping her inside the house and how Mrs. Wright job is only to be domestic wife. When Mrs. Hale (farmer’s wife) and Mrs. Peters (sheriff’s wife) discovered a dead bird with her neck bruised all over, they start to put the pieces to the puzzle together and ...
Mary Oliver’s unique responses to the owls illustrate the complexity of nature by displaying its two sides. Mary Oliver at first enjoys owls and all they have to offer, yet she later emphasizes her fear of a similar animal. The visual imagery she uses in her descriptions
Mr. Hale describes Mrs. Foster as being “queer” or strange. It is know that people in highly stressful situations can behave in a manner that is considered inappropriate such as laughing at a funeral and perhaps Minnie Foster is in such a situation that mental she is struggling to believe what has happened. She may also be in a state of shock causing peculiar behavior and a lack of judgement. Furthermore, the possible motive that Minnie Foster killed her husband over him killing her bird is weak. Mrs. Hale remembers Mrs. Foster as being a normal girl who people adored and yet how could such a normal person commit murder over the death of a bird. Perhaps the bird had died and she simply had not had time to bury the bird. Minnie Foster’s behavior suggest she was in shock over the death of her husband causing her to act strange not because she killed her husband and further the weakness of the suggested motive that she killed Mr. Foster because he killed her bird jumps to a conclusion without clear
Even when Jim is in this awful war-stricken place, one thing that he can still find comfort in, and which reminds him of his peaceful home is the birds, which are everywhere, still living their lives unaffected by mans war. This shows how nature is unaltered by mans cruel antics against other man, and how life and nature must, and will go on through all circumstances.
The tile of the poem “Bird” is simple and leads the reader smoothly into the body of the poem, which is contained in a single stanza of twenty lines. Laux immediately begins to describe a red-breasted bird trying to break into her home. She writes, “She tests a low branch, violet blossoms/swaying beside her” and it is interesting to note that Laux refers to the bird as being female (Laux 212). This is the first clue that the bird is a symbol for someone, or a group of people (women). The use of a bird in poetry often signifies freedom, and Laux’s use of the female bird implies female freedom and independence. She follows with an interesting image of the bird’s “beak and breast/held back, claws raking at the pan” and this conjures a mental picture of a bird who is flying not head first into a window, but almost holding herself back even as she flies forward (Laux 212). This makes the bird seem stubborn, and follows with the theme of the independent female.
In Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon, the "black bird" serves as a crucial link connecting Sam Spade and Brigid O’ Shaughnessy. The black bird functions as the structural bond of Spade and Brigid’s relationship because it represents their greed and desire for wealth. Hammet points out that the Brigid’s greed for the bird causes her to utilize detective Spade as a tool: "Help me, Mr. Spade. Help me because I need help so badly, and because if you don’t where will I find anyone who can, no matter how willing?" (Hammet 35). This quotation illustrates Brigid’s submissiveness and dependency on Mr. Spade to help her. But later she becomes the dominant figure when she utilizes her monetary wealth to her advantage: “She opened handbag with nervous fingers and put two hundred-dollar bills on Spade’s desk” (Hammett 9). Spade admits his greed when he says, he only “believed [Brigid’s] two hundred dollars” (Hammett 33) and not her story. The narrator illustrates how Spade views money as an adequate payment for his time. Spade and Brigid represent both the real black bird and the fake black bird because of their faulty façade, which cover up their true personalities.
A devoted mother, Anne Bradstreet is concerned with her children as she watches them grow up. “Or lest by Lime-twigs they be foil'd, or by some greedy hawks be spoil'd” Anne Bradstreet uses to describe her fear for her children. Not wanting to see her children suffer, Anne Bradstreet turns to God to help her children. Bradstreet imagines her bird’s being stuck on a branch and a hawk eating them, a grim image of all of her sacrifice being lost in a single moment. “No cost nor labour did I spare” describes how much Anne loves her children.
Mrs. McIntyre is a divorced and widowed woman who has learned to depend only on her own strength during the day to day operating of her farm. She has created a comfortable world to exist in, and she fears change in that world. Mrs. McIntyre's lack of spiritual dimension stems from this constancy of her surroundings. She has never been challenged by her circumstances and was thus never forced to examine her spiritual beliefs and their depth. We can see her fear of change when she speaks of the peacocks. She if afraid to let them all d...
Bird usually portrays an image of bad luck that follows afterwards and in this novel, that is. the beginning of all the bad events that occur in the rest of the novel. It all started when Margaret Laurence introduced the life of Vanessa MacLeod. protagonist of the story, also known as the granddaughter of a calm and intelligent woman. I am a woman.
Deception is portrayed in many forms in life. Through family, friends, strangers, and even government, it is hard to trust anyone. The novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, tells the story of how a lower-middle class woman navigates her new, fancier life filled with deception and mystery. Deception is a huge theme in Rebecca because there are many instances of it throughout. Rebecca deceives everyone into thinking she is innocent and pure, while Max and she deceive everyone into thinking that they have a happy marriage are the ideal couple. Another theme is justice and how to decide what is morally right. The plot and character development of Rebecca and Maxim show this because Max needs justification in his murder of Rebecca. The character
In Birdsong, Faulks considers the idea of the War as an ‘exploration of how far men can be degraded’ in terms of the impact that war had upon the individual characters, resulting in dehumanisation. The main feature of being human is individuality. During his three-day-rest, the character Jack reflects that each soldier had the potential to be an individual, but because of the ‘shadow of what awaited them, [they] were interchangeable’ which is an allusion towards the politics of the War; the men were simply seen as statistics. The men search for a fate within the War, demonstrated when Stephen plays cards with the men and claims that Weir would rather have a ‘malign providence than an indifferent one’ which suggests that the men want to feel that someone is planning their future. During a heavy bombardment, Faulks describes that Tipper’s ‘iris lost all light and sense of life’ during his ‘eruption of natural fear’ when the shells land near him. The eyes here are a metaphor for life; it is a human’s eyes which represent individuality and are often described as the window to the soul. Faulks’ description of the loss of light in the eyes suggests that, as a result of the War, Tipper has lost what makes him human. The natural fear and ‘shrill demented sound’ that arises from Tipper is a ‘primitive fear’ which su...