The Painted Bird (novel)
|
|
The Painted Bird is a controversial 1965 novel by Jerzy Kosiński which describes the world as seen by a young black-haired, black-eyed boy who wanders about small towns scattered around Central or Eastern Europe (presumably Poland or Belarus) during World War II. It was at first widely assumed that Kosiński was writing autobiography, but it later became clear that he was neither the boy in the story nor did he share any of the boy's experiences. It is now widely considered that the events depicted were fictional, and Kosiński did not wander the countryside of war-torn Europe.
The book describes the boy's encounter with peasants engaged in all forms of sexual and social deviance such as incest, bestiality and rape, and in a huge amount of violence – often at the expense of the child. While the book has been said to depict peasants in a derogatory fashion, some argue that it was not a particular social group, but all people, who are viewed as inherently predisposed to cruelty.
The title is drawn from an analogy to human life, described within the book. The boy finds himself in the company of a professional bird catcher. When the man is particularly upset or bored, he takes one of his captured birds and paints it several colors. Then he watches the bird fly through the air in search of a flock of its fellows. When it comes upon them, they see it as an intruder and tear at the bird until it dies, falling from the sky.
Some argue that the novel has contributed to false impressions of East European peasants. To others, the purpose of the book, from a deontological standpoint, was not to depict the cruelty of one group of people but to show the nature of all humanity, and of all existence, to be cruel.
Nevertheless, the book seriously offended the Polish farming family that had risked their lives to save Kosiński's during World War II. (For real stories about such people, see the article about the Polish village of Markowa). It is widely believed that this fact contributed to Kosiński's 1991 decision to commit suicide.
Sources
- Kosinski, Jerzy. The Painted Bird, Grove Press, 1995, ISBN 080213422X.