Grief is the Thing with Feathers

Dad is a Ted Hughes scholar, the father of the boys, and a grieving widower. Like all the other human characters in Grief, his actual name is never revealed. He can be interpreted as the protagonist of the book, although Porter does not adhere neatly to a protagonist versus antagonist framework in the narrative. The book’s two main conflicts are the family’s collective grieving process and Dad’s efforts to write and publish his book about Hughes. The latter plotline is less narratively dominant than the former, but the two are closely intertwined. For instance, the day that Dad has a final meeting with his publisher about the newly published book is the same day that Crow leaves the house, bringing both of these narrative elements to a close. Crow later tells him, “The credit should go to the boys, and to the deadline. I knew that by the time you sent your publisher your final draft of the Crow essay my work would be done” (103). In this way, even though Grief is about the family collectively, its narrative arc bends toward the events that matter to Dad.