32 pages • 1-hour read
Grief is the Thing with Feathers
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, cursing, animal cruelty, animal death, and death.
The Emotional Turmoil of Grief
Grief’s tone is marked by emotional extremes that often follow each other in quick succession. Exploring the varied landscape of each character’s emotional experience is one of Porter’s primary missions throughout the narrative, and through these shifts in tone the narrative explores and emulates the emotional turmoil of grief by observing Dad and the boys’ experience of loss.
This tonal pendulum is most evident in the language surrounding the actions of Dad and the boys after Mum’s death. For example, in the scene where the boys kill the guppy, they quickly go from having a murderous rage toward the fish to feeling sorrow over its death. One brother recalls, “Sure enough the fish was dead. All the fun was sucked across the wide empty beach. I felt sick and my brother swore” (19). Here, the description of the fish omits any culpability on the boys’ part for its death, highlighting the disconnect they feel between what they did and the results. Their visceral reactions to the dead fish further widen the gap between the two versions of themselves.
Similarly, Dad experiences a wide variety of emotions throughout the book, and the narrative parallels his shifting feelings from scene to scene, and sometimes from sentence to sentence. As the boys describe him, “He was young and good and sometimes funny. He was silent then he was livid then he was spiteful and unfamiliar, then he became obsessed and had visions and wrote and wrote and wrote” (60). The breathless recitation of Dad’s changing emotions, an example of polysyndeton (“he was”), mirrors the pace of the changes to illustrate how grief and loss can cause emotions to shift drastically from moment to moment.
In the transition from Part 2 to Part 3, the narrative features a notable tonal shift that indicates that the family has reached a new stage of grief. The book’s final scene has a significantly more tranquil tone than anything that came before it. Dad describes the scattering of ashes as “the sense of a cloud, the failure of clouds, scientifically quick and visually hopeless, a murder of little burnt birds flecked against the grey sky, the grey sea, the white sun, and gone” (116). Porter’s use of natural imagery reflects the scene’s natural setting, but it also effects a calming tone. For the first time in the book, there is a sense that all is as it should be, whereas before, everything was off-kilter in some way. This final emotional shift away from turmoil and toward peace serves as the book’s happy ending. Just as earlier passages used tone and style to reflect the emotional states of the characters, this closing scene offers the characters and the narrative resolution, affecting a quietly optimistic tone.
Caretaking During Bereavement
In Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, the loss of Mum is particularly significant because with her death, they lost the family’s major caregiving figure. In life, she took care of both Dad and the boys, but now Dad must try to step fully into the role of caregiver. Despite the enormity of this task, Dad struggles to accept caretaking assistance from others in the early stages of grief, recalling that when Crow rings the doorbell for the first time, “I braced myself for more kindness. Another lasagne, some books, a cuddle, some little potted ready-meals for the boys” (4). This tension between Dad’s need for help and his reluctance to seek it out is just part of the narrative’s exploration of how grief is compounded with the loss of a caregiver, as Dad, the boys, and even Crow struggle to fulfill the role that Mum always occupied.
Crow attempts to fill the caregiving void that is left behind by Mum, but he is incapable of doing so perfectly. Directly addressing the reader, he says, “I acknowledge that I could have been accused of showing symptoms related to unfulfilled maternal fantasies, but I am a crow and we can do many things in the dark, even play at Mommy” (64). At times, Crow has a nurturing demeanor, coloring with the boys and soothing them in moments of distress, but in other moments, Crow has a more violent presence, diverging from a typical human mother. For example, he gleefully eviscerates the grief demon that tries to prey on the boys, describing in detail how “the beak hurled down hammer-hard into the demon’s skull with a crack and a spurt then smashed onwards down through bone, brain, fluid and membrane, into squirting spine, vertebra snap, vertebra crunch, vertebra nibbled and spat” (56-57). As the title of Part 2, “Defence of the Nest,” suggests, this defensive violence is typical of how a crow parent would care for its chicks, but in the setting of a human household, it has an uncanny effect that illustrates the gaps between Crow’s efforts and Mum’s probable approach.
With Dad overwhelmed and Crow unable to behave as a human mother would, the boys are left without an adequate caregiver as they grieve. Crow’s final advice to them, “Just be kind and look out for your brother” (110), emphasizes their roles as caretakers for each other. Over the course of the book, the narrative emphasizes that this is not a role that the boys have necessarily played well, as they constantly endanger one another with violent games. However, the solidarity of their perspective, which is always presented in the first-person plural, never the first-person singular, suggests that they have been attempting to take care of each other in their own way. Through the ways in which Dad, the boys, and Crow attempt to assume the role of caregiver, the novel explores how loss and the absence of a loved one are compounded by the fact that the roles that they played within the family are left unfulfilled, or filled incompletely, by those left behind.
Love of Art as Escape From Pain
Dad uses art as an escape from the painful reality of his wife’s death; as he tells the reader, “Many people said ‘You need time’, when what I needed was Shakespeare, Ibn ‘Arabi, Shostakovich, Howlin’ Wolf” (38). Each of the four artists referenced here produced works thematically tied to grief and death. Shakespeare’s tragedies, such as Hamlet, are famous explorations of the emotional impact of death and grief, frequently culminating in the deaths of their protagonists. Ibn ‘Arabi, a Sufi mystic, wrote extensively about earthly suffering, including grief, in his philosophical works. Shostakovich’s music, much of which was produced under the violent authoritarian regime of Joseph Stalin, reflects the pain and suffering of its time. Finally, Howlin’ Wolf was an acclaimed blues singer who helped to popularize the American genre, with its melancholic tone and explorations of heartbreak, hardship, and injustice, with audiences in Europe. Through Porter’s choice of allusions here, the narrative clarifies that while Dad is using art as an escape from the pain of his real life, the art he is turning to is tailored to help him process his emotions.
Dad’s reliance on Crow can also be interpreted as an escape from pain through fiction, since Crow is a fictional character. Several references to Crow’s relationship with Ted Hughes make the connection to Hughes’s book, Crow, explicit. Crow reminds Dad, “Please remember I am your Ted’s song-legend, Crow of the death-chill, please. The God-eating, trash-licking, word-murdering, carcass-desecrating math-bomb motherfucker, and all that” (70). Dad has conjured a character from the oeuvre of his favorite writer to accompany him through the loneliness of losing his spouse. In actuality, Crow does not spare Dad or the boys any of the pain associated with the grieving process; in fact, he openly relishes the pain that the family is in: “I find humans dull except in grief. There are very few in health, disaster, famine, atrocity, splendour or normality that interest me (interest ME!) but the motherless children do. Motherless children are pure crow. For a sentimental bird it is ripe, rich and delicious to raid such a nest” (16). At the same time, Crow is intent on helping the family achieve some form of healing, even acting as an unofficial therapist. Observing that Dad has developed strange fantasies, Crow comments, “Fine by me, whatever gets him through” (25), permitting him to lose himself in fiction and treating this reaction to grief as positive, even when other people push Dad to move on. Through both Dad’s use of art to process his grief and the novella’s use of literary allusion, the narrative reflects on the importance of art to process complex emotional experiences.
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