In “The Scarlet Ibis,” Doodle is best symbolized by the bird, the scarlet ibis, because
Read the excerpt from "The Scarlet Ibis.”When he was two, if you laid him on his stomach, he began to try to move himself, straining terribly. The doctor said that with his weak heart this strain would probably kill him, but it didn’t. Trembling, he’d push himself up, turning first red, then a soft purple, and finally collapse back onto the bed like an old worn-out doll. I can still see Mama watching him, her hand pressed tight across her mouth, her eyes wide and unblinking. But he learned to crawl (it was his third winter), and we brought him out of the front bedroom, putting him on the rug before the fireplace. For the first time he became one of us.
Read the excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis.”But Mama, crying, told me that even if William Armstrong lived, he would never do these things with me. He might not, she sobbed, even be “all there.” He might, as long as he lived, lie on the rubber sheet in the center of the bed in the front bedroom where the white marquisette curtains billowed out in the afternoon sea breeze, rustling like palmetto fronds.
Which sentences from the excerpt most emphasize that spring has become a symbol of hope for the boys? Choose three answers.
Read the excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis.”The knowledge that Doodle’s and my plans had come to naught was bitter, and that streak of cruelty within me awakened. I ran as fast as I could, leaving him far behind with a wall of rain dividing us. The drops stung my face like nettles, and the wind flared the wet glistening leaves of the bordering trees. Soon I could hear his voice no more.
Read the excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis.”There is within me (and with sadness I have watched it in others) a knot of cruelty borne by the stream of love, much as our blood sometimes bears the seed of our destruction, and at times I was mean to Doodle. One day I took him up to the barn loft and showed him his casket, telling him how we all had believed he would die. It was covered with a film of Paris green sprinkled to kill the rats, and screech owls had built a nest inside it.Doodle studied the mahogany box for a long time, then said, “It’s not mine.”“It is,” I said. “And before I’ll help you down from the loft, you’re going to have to touch it.”
Read the excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis.”Daddy, Mama, and I went back to the dining-room table, but we watched Doodle through the open door. He took out a piece of string from his pocket and, without touching the ibis, looped one end around its neck. Slowly, while singing softly “Shall We Gather at the River,” he carried the bird around to the front yard and dug a hole in the flower garden, next to the petunia bed. Now we were watching him through the front window, but he didn’t know it. His awkwardness at digging the hole with a shovel whose handle was twice as long as he was made us laugh, and we covered our mouths with our hands so he wouldn’t hear.When Doodle came into the dining room, he found us seriously eating our cobbler.He was pale and lingered just inside the screen door. “Did you get the scarlet ibis buried?” asked Daddy.Doodle didn’t speak but just nodded his head.
Which excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis” most foreshadows that the narrator will feel regret for something he has done to Doodle?
paradisesadnesssafetyloneliness
Read the excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis.”1 It’s strange that all this is still so clear to me, now that the summer has long since fled and time has had its way. 2 A grindstone stands where the bleeding tree stood, just outside the kitchen door, and now if an oriole sings in the elm, its song seems to die up in the leaves, a silvery dust. 3 The flower garden is prim, the house a gleaming white, and the pale fence across the yard stands straight and spruce. 4 But sometimes (like right now), as I sit in the cool, green-draped parlor, the grindstone begins to turn, and time with all its changes is ground away—and I remember Doodle.
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