The Scarlet Ibis

The story juxtaposes two central themes: loss and hope. Although the doctors deem Doodle’s disabilities as restrictive and the Armstrongs believe he will die as an infant, the boy survives. Descriptions of Doodle’s determination to walk, his appreciation of the natural world, and his imagination provide glimmers of hope. His creative stories, centered on a future of togetherness with his family, for instance, are considered “beautiful and serene” (51) by his brother. Yet, along with this sense of hope comes the theme of loss, which is woven throughout the narrative through frequent references to death, decay, rot, and blood. The juxtaposition of negative and positive imagery underscores the tragedy of Doodle’s death at age five.

Hurst often provides inanimate objects, animals, and ideas with traits and characteristics of human beings. This literary device is evident when the narrator describes the graveyard flowers as “speaking softly the names of the dead” (48). The writer also provides the seasons with a human lifespan, describing the day when the scarlet ibis landed in the bleeding tree as a time when “summer was dead but autumn had not yet been born” (48). In personifying the seasons, Hurst suggests that the day of the ibis and Doodle’s deaths was a liminal time. By describing that moment as not yet autumn but past summer, the author illustrates the difference between the hopeful world of a living summer and the somber feeling of autumn’s impending decay. At the story’s end, the personification of the rain gives the storm a physical force and presence, allowing the narrator to distance himself from Doodle’s death even as it is about to occur. The rain, which comes “roaring through the pines” (53) and divides the brothers, functions as an antagonist, slowing the narrator’s return to Doodle and lessening his chance of redemption.