Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird

Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird
Began: 1/31/07
End: 02/01/07
Quality: Six Out of Ten.
Reason: Unread
Genre: Non-fiction. Philosophy
.Number: First.
Thoughts:
Hot Damn! This shit is depressing. I think I need a round of prozac after this novel. While I did enjoy it, while I felt it was an important and powerful novel, it was still hard to get through it. I mean Kosinksi’s portrayal of the cruelty of man to man was just so overpowering. It literally is just episode after episode of brutalization. And Kosinski does not skimp on the sins. You get your share of violence, rape, bestiality, incest, terrorism, murder, child abuse, ect.

Their was one brief moment of hope, a startling few chapters where he is picked up by the Russian Army and loved but they soon are forced to give him up to the orphanage where the abuse and brutalization begin anew.

I was never sure whether Kosinski regards humans as just bestial animals prone to cruelty, that normally they wear only a thin sheen of morality. My only thought was that Kosinski was just illuminating the psychological and sociological effects of war.

The image of the painted bird was particularly powerful to me. The beginning of the book is rampant with images of animals, especially birds. Nature is seen as a rather dark and diabolical presence. And man is seemingly just another aspect of that. One of the care-takers of the boy traps birds for a living. He occasionally will cover one of the birds with paint and set it loose. It will fly away to be among it’s own kind at which point they will attack and kill it because they do not recognize it as such.

This not only gives the reader a foreshadowing of what is going to take place throughout the storyline but is very much the overarching theme of the story. This boy is seemingly painted by god or genetics or what have you and thus his own kind (Home Sapiens) do not regonize him as such and so attack him.





And this is not a view that I have that much ideological difference with. But for me anyway, he seems to just see the black view and nothing else. Not that I can really blame him. I never lived through nazi occupation.

I found the image of the painted bird fitting for the novel. Here is a boy who is seemingly painted by god and sent among his people, only to be hurt over and over again by them because they think he is a gypsy. It never really says what his ethnic background is that I recall anyway.

I also perhaps found it interesting in light of America’s current obsession with war and nation building. Perhaps, we should force every president to read this book to show them the psychological and physiological impact of war. I think it was especially appropriate to cast the protagonist as a young child.