52 pages • 1 hour read
The Painted Bird
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Themes
The Brutality of Human Nature
The fact that every culture tears apart its own “painted birds” suggests that humans and society are inherently disposed to violence and cruelty. The peasants are isolated, appearing left behind by time—in other words, humans at their most primitive. However, they are no more violent than those in civilized society. After all, the boy goes to the village to begin with in order to escape the horrors of the Holocaust. This brutality is often demonstrated in the mirroring of the human and animal worlds. For example, the cats mating on the floor of the miller’s house mimic the sexual affair of the plowboy and the miller’s wife. Similarly, the cannibalistic rats in the military bunker seem to reflect the way people turn on each other. Even Labina’s sexual escapades are described in animalistic terms. This language and these metaphors suggest that not much separates animals from humans.
Sex as Power
Sex in The Painted Bird tends to be depraved and described in animalistic terms: the miller’s wife and the plowboy are compared to mating cats; Ludmila sexually assaults the boy (and is beaten by the peasants as they lie with her); Ewka has sexual relations with animals (not to mention with a child); the Kalmuks brutally rape men, women, and children; and the girls in the orphanage, having been sexually assaulted during the war, “stripped and asked boys to touch them” (215).
Sex is often used as an assertion of one’s power—or, at least, of a person’s attempt to gain power. Ludmila and Labina seem to use sex to ameliorate their suffering. Ewka, sexually abused by her father, begins a sexual relationship with a child, whom she can control. The girls in the orphanage use sex, the very thing once forced from them, as a source of power. Conversely, the peasants turn to violence to avenge their sexual grievances: the plowboy is maimed by the cuckolded miller, Ludmila is beaten to death by jealous wives, and the Jewish girl raped by Rainbow is murdered when he becomes trapped within her body. The boy, meanwhile, witnesses it all and, moldable child as he is, internalizes the connection between sex and power, and even violence. It’s therefore no wonder that in his sexual fantasies, he’s an SS officer or a bird catcher, for both the officer and the bird catcher are in positions of power.
Revenge and Justice
Mitka’s teachings on revenge at the end of the novel have been preempted by countless incidents of revenge among the peasants. The peasants adhere to a sort of eye-for-an-eye belief system, in which violent punishment is delivered in proportion to the emotional damage a person feels he or she has suffered. While the plowboy and Ludmila are perhaps the most notable examples, the novel is littered with them. For instance, the boy tells the story of a skull rising from the grave and causing the accident that kills its murderer. The peasants condone the murder of Jews in the concentration camps; they feel the Jews “were being justly punished for the shameful crimes of their ancestors,” that “the Lord was using the Germans as His instrument of justice” (96). It all culminates with Mitka, who teaches the boy that “[a] man should consider every wrong he had suffered and decide on the appropriate revenge,” which “should be in proportion to all the pain, bitterness, and humiliation felt as a result of an opponent’s action (214). Mitka frames revenge as justice, which is personal, individual business.
The scene in which the Silent One derails the train seems to question the efficacy of revenge as a system of justice. After taking such drastic action to avenge the boy, the Silent One realizes he failed to kill the marketplace vendor who’d beaten him. Even Mitka doesn’t achieve true vengeance, for he kills random peasants, not the peasants who murdered his friends. The novel doesn’t seem to offer whether justice can ever truly be achieved.
Superstition versus Catholicism
Throughout the novel, the boy searches for order, for a sure-fire way to end his victimhood. He discovers that, just as human nature is uniformly brutal, people’s different belief systems prove equally unreliable. The boy expects the murderer at the wedding to die when he comes in contact with the bloodstains, but nothing happens. He attempts to kill Garbos by blowing three times on a particular moth, yet Garbos, too, lives. Similarly, despite his fervent dedication to prayer, he is thrown into a manure pit—during Mass, no less. When he discovers Ewka coupling with the goat, the boy finally abandons both superstition and Catholicism, concluding that the only true force in the world is Evil.
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