Grief is the Thing with Feathers

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.