Birds In The House Analysis

In his collection of short stories Tunneling to the Center of the Earth Kevin Wilson wrote “Birds in the House”. Nobio Collier the narrator’s grandmother is a Japanese woman and the mother of four boys. When she died she wrote in her will that the bothers would have a contest “whose outcome I [the narrator] will determine” (Wilson 58) to see who would inherit the family home. A reviewer describes the estate as an “antebellum estate” (Kirkus Reviews 170). In a review the story is described as “four mutually loathing brothers fold hundreds of paper cranes for a contest to determine who will own the family plantation house” (Olson 24). It is because the narrator’s family has had a rough, and violent past that makes them all so damaged, and unpleasant …show more content…
The biggest brother Mizell’s “third wife” (Wilson 61) was arrested for unplugging his breathing machine while he was asleep. It is not surprising that his wife tried to kill him, the brothers do not have charming or loving personalities, and it got so bad that even their spouses and family did not want to be around them. The narrator’s mother is another example of how the bitterness of the family has drove away people they love. The narrator explained how their mother left during the night without saying anything to anyone. The family has to be extremely unbearable for the mother to just leave her child in the middle of the night. Although the narrators father had said that he told the mother she could not take the child, it is easy to think that the mother did not want to take her kid because she feared that the narrator would grow up to become exactly like the rest of the Collier family, cruel and …show more content…
May was on the right track by saying the birds flying around the room was a picture of how the brothers were always fighting with each other because it was a bid jumbled mess in the air. Instead of watching his or her father and uncles fight on the floor to see which initials were on the birds that had fallen to the floor, the narrator chose to watch all the ones that were still floating into the air, and describes it as “a rainbow of cranes” (Wilson 70). The narrator stood, and watched each crane fall one by one until the final crane was in the air and he or she hoped that it would never fall because in that moment the narrator was thinking about the grandmother, “[hoping] that she is somewhere far away, somewhere that even birds cannot reach, and I hope that she is happy” (Wilson