32 pages • 1-hour read
Grief is the Thing with Feathers
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Character Analysis
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, cursing, addiction, animal cruelty, animal death, and death, including death by suicide.
Dad
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.
Although addiction is not the main subject of the novel, there are frequent enough mentions of Dad’s reliance on alcohol while he is grieving that it becomes an essential undercurrent of the story. In one scene, Crow finds Dad passed out on the couch, apparently after a drinking episode, and tells the boys, “Your Dad seems to be dead!” (60). By presenting Dad’s alcohol misuse through his children’s eyes, Porter illustrates how it serves to compound the trauma of their mother’s death, heightening the sense of instability in the household. Crow gives voice to their fear of losing another parent, and to their understanding that Dad’s apparent addiction could turn that fear into a reality. The boys do not judge their father morally for his addiction, however; instead, they describe it very lyrically: “He had the perpetual look and demeanour of someone floating, turning in the beer-gold light of evening and being surprised by the enduring warmth” (105-06). This metaphor, which plays upon the similarity in color between beer and the color of sunlight during sunset, is imbued with a sense of understanding on the boys’ part, with the suggestion of warmth highlighting how they even seem to understand the relief he experiences. Even though Dad is unable to be as present as his sons might need following the death of Mum, the boys adopt a compassionate attitude toward him. Dad is a dynamic character, and his arc over the course of the narrative involves working through the grieving process to reestablish a relationship with his sons under new circumstances.
The Boys
Although they are two individual brothers, Grief treats Dad’s two sons as one entity (collectively “the boys”). In some moments, it is clear that the two of them are engaged in a dialogue, such as in the first episode, when they discuss the feathers they’ve discovered on their pillows, but more frequently, they speak as one. Porter omits quotation marks in their speaking sections in order to blur the boundaries between the two boys, further supporting the idea that, in the context of the narrative, they are one. Toward the end of the book, this is further developed at the conclusion of an episode, when one of them says, “I’m either brother,” muddying their two identities even further (97).
Unlike Dad, an adult who is able to effectively articulate his emotional response to Mum’s death, the boys’ emotions are made apparent most clearly through their violent behavior. They report this behavior very honestly to the reader, with a flat tone: “My brother and I discovered a guppy fish in a rock pool somewhere. We set about trying to kill it” (19). It is only after they have successfully killed the fish that they have an appropriate emotional response to their own actions, becoming nauseous and running to Dad for comfort. Dad, however, is unable to provide them with adequate comfort, resulting in the continuation of their violent behavior. The boys are, therefore, simultaneously the most pugnacious and the most vulnerable characters in the book, contained mainly in their own world, with their father, preoccupied, on the outside.
However, Dad sees the boys in a completely different light than the violent version of themselves that they present when speaking. In one scene, he remarks to the reader, “They offer me a space on the sofa next to them and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me” (46). This stark difference between their internal experience and external appearance mirrors what is happening with Dad, who has to find a way to take care of the boys and write his book, even as he is submerged in grief and loss on the inside. Like Dad, the boys support Porter’s exploration of the dichotomy between external and internal grieving selves in all the book’s characters.
Crow
Crow is an embodiment of Dad’s grief, a large anthropomorphic bird who speaks like a human but also displays typical behavior of crows. His arrival signifies the full realization of grief in Dad and the boys’ lives, foreshadowed by the few black feathers on the boys’ pillows. He is, by turns, caring and violent, but the violence he perpetrates makes sense when seen as a manifestation of his identity as an animal. In protecting the boys, Crow can be cruelly violent, but he also acts as a type of therapist for everyone in the family, holding deep conversations with Dad and offering fairy tales to the boys that serve as moral lessons.
Crow’s masculinity is a manifestation of Dad’s masculine self-expression, in his role as an extension of Dad’s inner world. Katie Kitamura of The New York Times writes, “An emanation of the father’s grieving psyche, Crow is among other things a figure that emphasizes the masculinity of the grieving tribe, this chorus of abandoned men. Crow is a self-declared caregiver but fails to replace the lost mother” (Kitamura, Katie. “Their Grief Counselor is a Crow. It’s Fiction.” New York Times, 1 Jul. 2016). This interpretation is reinforced by the fact that Ted Hughes’s original Crow in Crow was explicitly male.
Another notable aspect of Crow’s character is his voice, which is constantly evolving in its tone, dialect, and diction. Often, he speaks with a fast-moving, onomatopoeic, frequently expletive-laced vernacular that has been interpreted in stage adaptations and in the 2025 film adaptation as a working-class accent. For example, in his first section as speaker, he interjects into one of his own sentences with the exclamatory parenthetical, “BIRD FEATHERS UP YER CRACK, DOWN YER COCK-EYE, IN YER MOUTH” (10). This way of speaking contrasts directly with the affluent, academic voice of Dad, and pokes fun at his polite exterior. In this way, Porter emphasizes that grief, embodied by Crow, is not concerned with social graces and instead operates on the level of blunt feelings and thoughts.
Ted Hughes
In Grief, Dad is a scholar of Hughes’s work and is working toward publishing a book about him at the same time that he grieves the death of his wife. Just like Crow, therefore, Hughes becomes a companion to Dad in his grief. This close, though one-sided, relationship is made most clear in the episode where Dad goes to see Hughes speak at Oxford, in which Hughes answers Dad’s question:
As our Dad was shuffling his way to the exit a vast poet’s hand clapped down on his shoulder and the full-fathom-twenty drone boom-dry loveliness of Ted Hughes’ warm Yorkish accent coated our happy Daddy. “Yes,” said Hughes, looking Dad in the eye. “Yes?” said our Dad. “Yup,” said Hughes, and turned away (88).
The intimacy of Hughes’s physical gesture, the eye contact that he makes, and the familiarity of their conversation (which consists of only one word repeated three times) suggest a mutual understanding between the two men that amounts to the start of a friendship, even though it is the only time they ever meet. In addition, Dad and the boys refer to Hughes familiarly as Ted throughout the novel, suggesting that they are close enough to be on a first-name basis with the poet.
Hughes’ ill-fated marriage to fellow poet Sylvia Plath is used as an allegory for the family circumstances of Dad and the boys. Like Hughes, Dad has two children and is coming to terms with the unexpected death of their mother. Plath died by suicide in 1963, a year after her marriage with Hughes informally ended; their two children were present in the home when she died. Because Hughes was still technically married to Plath at the time of her death, he inherited her estate and faced criticism over his handling of it for the rest of his life. Perhaps most controversially, he burned Plath’s final journal, stating that he did not want his children to read it.
Hughes’ reticence to speak about Plath in the aftermath of her death is highlighted in the aforementioned Oxford episode, when Hughes refuses to answer an audience member’s question about her. Even with this episode, the narrative draws attention to how the loss of a spouse and partner ripples through one’s life. It also explores how others might see and judge decisions made in the wake of that death and the individual intricacies of the grieving process.
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