Violence in The Novel the Painted Bird Analysis MLA format paperThesis statement: Violence has been prevalent in society, since the birth of the first men.

Violence in The Novel the Painted Bird Analysis MLA format paperThesis statement: Violence has been prevalent in society, since the birth of the first men. Violence was used as a way to protect yourself and loved ones and still is to this day. There have also been moments where violence seemed to be used just for the hatred of specific people. For example, the Nazis during WWII were taking part in the genocide of many innocent people who were not of Aryan blood. This paper will discuss how violence affects humans, how 19th century society influenced the acts of violence during that time, how symbols were used subliminally to show the view of certain people in that time period, and how this all ties in to the novel. Needs in-text citations Summary:
Semiautobiographical novel by Jerzy Kosinski, published in 1965 and revised
in 1976. The ordeals of the central character parallel Kosinski’s own
experiences during World War II. A dark-haired Polish child who is taken for
either a Gypsy or a Jew loses his parents in the mayhem of war and wanders
through the countryside at the mercy of the brutal, thickheaded peasants he
meets in the villages. He learns how to stay alive at any cost, turning survival
into a moral imperative. Full of graphic scenes depicting rape, torture, and
bestiality, the novel portrays evil in all its manifestations and speaks of
human isolation as inevitable.
BOOKS BY JERZY KOSINSKI
NOVELS
The Painted Bird
Steps
Being There
The Devil Tree
Cockpit
Blind Date
Passion Play
Pinball
The Hermit of 69th Street
ESSAYS
Passing By
Notes of the Author
The Art of the Self
NONFICTION
(Under the pen name Joseph Novak)
The Future Is Ours, Comrade
No Third Path
To the memory of my wife Mary Hayward Weir
without whom even the past would
lose its meaning
Copyright © 1965, 1976 by Jerzy N. Kosinski
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and
retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by
a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading,
and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the
permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized
electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of
copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any
member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the
work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to
Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or
permissions@groveatlantic.com.
First published in the United States of America in 1976 by Houghton
Mifflin Company
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The painted bird/Jerzy Kosinski; with an introduction by the
author.—2nd ed.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9575-3
1. Poland—History—Occupation, 1939-1945—Fiction. 2. World
War, 1939-1945—Europe, Eastern—Fiction. 3. Abandoned children—
Europe, Eastern—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3561.O8P3 1995 813’.54—dc20
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
95-19520
and only God,
omnipotent indeed,
knew they were mammals
of a different breed.
MAYAKOVSKY
This new edition of The Painted Bird incorporates some
material that did not appear in the first edition.
AFTERWARD
In the spring of 1963, I visited Switzerland with my American-born
wife, Mary. We had vacationed there before, but were now in the country for
a different purpose: my wife had been battling a supposedly incurable illness
for months and had come to Switzerland to consult yet another group of
specialists. Since we expected to remain for some time, we had taken a suite
in a palatial hotel that dominated the lake-front of a fashionable old resort.
Among the permanent residents at the hotel was a clique of wealthy
Western Europeans who had come to the town just before the outbreak of
World War II. They had all abandoned their homelands before the slaughter
actually began and they never had to fight for their lives. Once ensconced in
their Swiss haven, self-preservation for them meant no more than living from
day to day. Most of them were in their seventies and eighties, aimless
pensioners obsessively talking about getting old, growing steadily less able or
willing to leave the hotel grounds. They spent their time in the lounges and
restaurants or strolling through the private park. I often followed them,
pausing when they did before portraits of statesmen who had visited the hotel
between the wars; I read with them the somber plaques commemorating
various international peace conferences that had been held in the hotel’s
convention halls after World War I.
Occasionally I would chat with a few of these voluntary exiles, but
whenever I alluded to the war years in Central or Eastern Europe, they never
failed to remind me that, because they had come to Switzerland before the
violence began, they knew the war only vaguely, through radio and
newspaper reports. Referring to one country in which most of the
extermination camps had been located, I pointed out that between 1939 and
1945 only a million people had died as the result of direct military action, but
five and a half million had been exterminated by the invaders. Over three
million victims were Jews, and one third of them were under sixteen. These
losses worked out to two hundred and twenty deaths per thousand people, and
no one would ever be able to compute how many others were mutilated,
traumatized, broken in health or spirit. My listeners nodded politely,
admitting that they had always believed that reports about the camps and gas
chambers had been much embellished by overwrought reporters. I assured
them that, having spent my childhood and adolescence during the war and
postwar years in Eastern Europe, I knew that real events had been far more
brutal than the most bizarre fantasies.
On days when my wife was confined to the clinic for treatment, I would
hire a car and drive, with no destination in mind. I cruised along smartly
manicured Swiss roads winding through fields which bristled with squat steel
and concrete tank traps, planted dur-the war to impede advancing tanks. They
still stood, a crumbling defense against an invasion that was never launched,
as out of place and purposeless as the antiquated exiles at the hotel.
Many afternoons, I rented a boat and rowed aimlessly on the lake. During
those moments I experienced my isolation intensely: my wife, the emotional
link to my existence in the United States, was dying. I could contact what
remained of my family in Eastern Europe only through infrequent, cryptic
letters, always at the mercy of the censor.
As I drifted across the lake, I felt haunted by a sense of hopelessness; not
merely loneliness, or the fear of my wife’s death, but a sense of anguish
directly connected to the emptiness of the exiles’ lives and the ineffectiveness
of the postwar peace conferences. As I thought of the plaques that adorned
the hotel walls I questioned whether the authors of peace treaties had signed
them in good faith. The events that followed the conferences did not support
such a conjecture. Yet the aging exiles in the hotel continued to believe that
the war had been some inexplicable aberration in a world of well-intentioned
politicians whose humani-tarianism could not be challenged. They could not
accept that certain guarantors of peace had later become the initiators of war.
Because of this disbelief, millions like my parents and myself, lacking any
chance to escape, had been forced to experience events far worse than those
that the treaties so grandiloquently prohibited.
The extreme discrepancy between the facts as I knew them and the exiles’
and diplomats’ hazy, unrealistic view of the world bothered me intensely. I
began to reexamine my past and decided to turn from my studies of social
science to fiction. Unlike politics, which offered only extravagant promises
of a Utopian future, I knew fiction could present lives as they are truly lived.
When I had come to America six years before this European visit, I was
determined never again to set foot in the country where I had spent the war
years. That I had survived was due solely to chance, and I had always been
acutely aware that hundreds of thousands of other children had been
condemned. But although I felt strongly about that injustice, I did not
perceive myself as a vendor of personal guilt and private reminiscences, nor
as a chronicler of the disaster that befell my people and my generation, but
purely as a storyteller.
“. . . the truth is the only thing in which people do not differ. Everyone is
subconsciously mastered by the spiritual will to live, by the aspiration to live
at any cost; one wants to live because one lives, because the whole world
lives . . .” wrote a Jewish concentration camp inmate shortly before his death
in the gas chamber. “We are here in the company of death,” wrote another
inmate. “They tattoo the newcomers. Everyone gets his number. From that
moment on you have lost your ‘self and have become transformed into a
number. You no longer are what you were before, but a worthless moving
number . . . We are approaching our new graves . . . iron discipline reigns
here in the camp of death. Our brain has grown dull, the thoughts are
numbered: it is not possible to grasp this new language . . .”
My purpose in writing a novel was to examine “this new language” of
brutality and its consequent new counter-language of anguish and despair.
The book would be written in English, in which I had already written two
works of social psychology, having relinquished my mother tongue when I
abandoned my homeland. Moreover, as English was still new to me, I could
write dispassionately, free from the emotional connotation one’s native
language always contains.
As the story began to evolve, I realized that I wanted to extend certain
themes, modulating them through a series of five novels. This five-book
cycle would present archetypal aspects of the individual’s relationship to
society. The first book of the cycle was to deal with the most universally
accessible of these societal metaphors: man would be portrayed in his most
vulnerable state, as a child, and society in its most deadly form, in a state of
war. I hoped the confrontation between the defenseless individual and
overpowering society, between the child and war, would represent the
essential anti-human condition.
Furthermore, it seemed to me, novels about childhood demand the ultimate
act of imaginative involvement. Since we have no direct access to that most
sensitive, earliest period of our lives, we must recreate it before we can begin
to assess our present selves. Although all novels force us into such an act of
transference, making us experience ourselves as different beings, it is
generally more difficult to imagine ourselves as children than as adults.
As I began to write, I recalled The Birds, the satirical play by
Aristophanes. His protagonists, based on important citizens of ancient
Athens, were made anonymous in an idyllic natural realm, “a land of easy
and fair rest, where man can sleep safely and grow feathers.” I was struck by
the pertinence and universality of the setting Aristophanes had provided more
than two millennia ago.
Aristophanes’ symbolic use of birds, which allowed him to deal with
actual events and characters without the restrictions which the writing of
history imposes, seemed particularly appropriate, as I associated it with a
peasant custom I had witnessed during my childhood. One of the villagers’
favorite entertainments was trapping birds, painting their feathers, then
releasing them to rejoin their flock. As these brightly colored creatures
sought the safety of their fellows, the other birds, seeing them as threatening
aliens, attacked and tore at the outcasts until they killed them. I decided I too
would set my work in a mythic domain, in the timeless fictive present,
unrestrained by geography or history. My novel would be called The Painted
Bird.
Because I saw myself solely as a storyteller, the first edition of The
Painted Bird carried only minimal information about me and I refused to give
any interviews. Yet this very stand placed me in a position of conflict. Wellintentioned writers, critics, and readers sought facts to back up their claims
that the novel was autobiographical. They wanted to cast me in the role of
spokesman for my generation, especially for those who had survived the war;
but for me survival was an individual action that earned the survivor the right
to speak only for himself. Facts about my life and my origins, I felt, should
not be used to test the book’s authenticity, any more than they should be used
to encourage readers to read The Painted Bird.
Furthermore, I felt then, as I do now, that fiction and autobiography are
very different modes. Autobiography emphasizes a single life: the reader is
invited to become the observer of another man’s existence and encouraged to
compare his own life to the subject’s. A fictional life, on the other hand,
forces the reader to contribute: he does not simply compare; he actually
enters a fictional role, expanding it in terms of his own experience, his own
creative and imaginative powers.
I remained determined that the novel’s life be independent of mine. I
objected when many foreign publishers refused to issue The Painted Bird
without including, as a preface or as an epilogue, excerpts from my personal
correspondence with one of my first foreign-language publishers. They hoped
that these excerpts would soften the book’s impact. I had written these letters
in order to explain, rather than mitigate, the novel’s vision; thrust between the
book and its readers, they violated the novel’s integrity, interjecting my
immediate presence into a work intended to stand by itself. The paperback
version of The Painted Bird, which followed a year after the original,
contained no biographical information at all. Perhaps it was because of this
that many school reading lists placed Kosinski not among contemporary
writers, but among the deceased.
*
After The Painted Bird’s publication in the United States and in Western
Europe (it was never published in my homeland, nor allowed across its
borders), certain East European newspapers and magazines launched a
campaign against it. Despite their ideological differences, many journals
attacked the same passages from the novel (usually quoted out of context)
and altered sequences to support their accusations. Outraged editorials in
State-controlled publications charged that American authorities had assigned
me to write The Painted Bird for covert political purposes. These
publications, ostensibly unaware that every book published in the United
States must be registered by the Library of Congress, even cited the Library
catalogue number as conclusive evidence that the United States government
had subsidized the book. Conversely, the anti-Soviet periodicals singled out
the positive light in which, they claimed, I had portrayed the Russian soldiers,
as proof that the book attempted to justify the Soviet presence in Eastern
Europe.
Most Eastern European condemnation focused on the novel’s alleged
specificity. Although I had made sure that the names of people and places I
used could not be associated exclusively with any national group, my critics
accused The Painted Bird of being a libelous documentary of life in
identifiable communities during the Second World War. Some detractors
even insisted that my references to folklore and native customs, so brazenly
detailed, were caricatures of their particular home provinces. Still others
attacked the novel for distorting native lore, for defaming the peasant
character, and for reinforcing the propaganda weapons of the region’s
enemies.
As I later learned, these diverse criticisms were part of a large-scale
attempt by an extreme nationalist group to create a feeling of danger and
disruption within my homeland, a plot intended to force the remaining Jewish
population to leave the State. The New York Times reported that The Painted
Bird was being denounced as propaganda by reactionary forces “seeking an
armed showdown with Eastern Europe.” Ironically, the novel began to
assume a role not unlike that of its protagonist, the boy, a native who has
become an alien, a Gypsy who is believed to command destructive forces and
to be able to cast spells over all who cross his path.
The campaign against the book, which had been generated in the capital of
the country, soon spread throughout the nation. Within a few weeks, several
hundred articles and an avalanche of gossip items appeared. The statecontrolled television network commenced a series, “In the Footsteps of The
Painted Bird,” presenting interviews with persons who had supposedly come
in contact with me or my family during the war years. The interviewer would
read a passage from The Painted Bird, then produce a person he claimed was
the individual on whom the fictional character was based. As these
disoriented, often uneducated witnesses were brought forward, horrified at
what they were supposed to have done, they angrily denounced the book and
its author.
One of Eastern Europe’s most accomplished and revered authors read The
Painted Bird in its French translation and praised the novel in his review.
Government pressure soon forced him to recant. He published his revised
opinion, then followed it with an “Open Letter to Jerzy Kosinski,” which
appeared in the literary magazine he himself edited. In it, he warned me that
I, like another prize-winning novelist who had betrayed his native language
for an alien tongue and the praise of the decadent West, would end my days
by cutting my throat in some seedy hotel on the Riviera.
At the time of the publication of The Painted Bird, my mother, my only
surviving blood relative, was in her sixties and had undergone two operations
for cancer. When the leading local newspaper discovered she was still living
in the city where I had been born, it printed scurrilous articles referring to her
as the mother of a renegade, inciting local zealots and crowds of enraged
townspeople to descend upon her house. Summoned by my mother’s nurse,
the police arrived but stood idly by, only pretending to control the vigilantes.
When an old school friend telephoned me in New York to tell me,
guardedly, what was happening, I mobilized whatever support I could from
international organizations, but for months it seemed to do little good, for the
angry townspeople, none of whom had actually seen my book, continued
their attacks. Finally government officials, embarrassed by pressures brought
by concerned organizations outside the country, ordered the municipal
authorities to move my mother to another town. She remained there for a few
weeks until the assaults died down, then moved to the capital, leaving
everything behind her. With the help of certain friends, I was able to keep
informed about her whereabouts and to get money to her regularly.
Although most of her family had been exterminated in the country which
now persecuted her, my mother refused to emigrate, insisting that she wanted
to die and be buried next to my father, in the land where she had been born
and where all her people had perished. When she did die, her death was made
an occasion of shame and a warning to her friends. No public announcement
of the funeral was permitted by the authorities, and the simple death notice
was not published until several days after her burial.
In the United States, press reports of these foreign attacks provoked a flood
of anonymous threatening letters from naturalized Eastern Europeans, who
felt I had slandered their countrymen and maligned their ethnic heritage.
Almost none of the nameless letter writers seemed to have actually read The
Painted Bird; most of them merely parroted the East European attacks carried
secondhand in émigré publications.
One day when I was alone in my Manhattan apartment, the bell rang.
Assuming it was a delivery I expected, I immediately opened the door. Two
burly men in heavy raincoats pushed me into the room, slamming the door
shut behind them. They pinned me against the wall and examined me closely.
Apparently confused, one of them pulled a newspaper clipping from his
pocket. It was the New York Times article about t…
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