The Painted Bird

Though The Painted Bird is set during the Holocaust, it is not strictly a Holocaust novel. The book is largely metaphorical and deals with the brutality of human nature and how the horrors we perpetrate on each other become part of us. The novel’s protagonist, a boy who is an outsider, or a “painted bird,” witnesses acts of subjugation and cruelty and seeks to understand why some people are more powerful than others. Thematically, the novel deals with the conflation of human and animal, and the interplay of violence and control.

The Painted Bird is told in the first-person from the point of view of an unnamed boy of unknown ethnicity. It takes place in Eastern Europe during World War II, beginning in 1939, when the boy is six years old, and spanning six years. When the novel opens, a third-person narrator explains that the boy’s parents fear arrest by the Nazis and decide to go into hiding. They arrange for their son to travel from their city to a village far away, in the countryside. The peasants there are isolated, poor, and superstitious, and without modern conveniences.