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.”
paradisesadnesssafetyloneliness
In “The Scarlet Ibis,” how does the death of the scarlet ibis foreshadow the death of Doodle?
Which excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis” most foreshadows that the narrator will feel regret for something he has done to Doodle?
Read the excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis.”I thought myself pretty smart at many things, like holding my breath, running, jumping, or climbing the vines in Old Woman Swamp, and I wanted more than anything else someone to race to Horsehead Landing, someone to box with, and someone to perch with in the top fork of the great pine behind the barn, where across the fields and swamps you could see the sea. I wanted a brother.
Which excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis” most foreshadows Doodle’s death?
Read the excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis.”The lightning was near now, and from fear he walked so close behind me he kept stepping on my heels. The faster I walked, the faster he walked, so I began to run. The rain was coming, roaring through the pines, and then, like a bursting Roman candle, a gum tree ahead of us was shattered by a bolt of lightning. When the deafening peal of thunder had died, and in the moment before the rain arrived, I heard Doodle, who had fallen behind, cry out, “Brother, Brother, don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”
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.”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.”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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