The Scarlet Ibis Theme Analysis

The short story “The Scarlet Ibis” by James Hurst portrays the theme that you shouldn’t let your pride and cruelty deprive you of your judgement. This short story begins by telling us about where the narrator lives, but as he continues he takes us through his memory and into a time when he had a brand new baby brother named William Armstrong. The narrator’s baby brother eventually learned how to crawl, but he crawled backwards, and as he got older he showed no signs of walking, until, when he was 5 years old, he took the couple steps to the kitchen table and sat down at his seat. Eventually, when a major storm comes through, both the narrator and doodle(the baby brother) try to get home, but instead of walking at a decent pace with doodle the …show more content…
This shows that you shouldn’t let your pride and cruelty deprive you of your judgement because instead of just letting Doodle rest and get better, the narrator’s pride pushed him to continue on with his brother’s training. And this was the start of something that the narrator might regret for the rest of his life. This theme is also shown at the end of the story, after a lightning bolt destroyed a tree, when doodle tripped, a moment of cruelty took the narrator’s judgement. The narrator says, “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”(5). This shows that you shouldn’t let your cruelty and pride deprive you of your judgement because instead of helping his brother get back home safely, the narrator, out of cruelty, decides to run, leaving his brother far behind. After this act, the narrator returns to find his brother only to learn that Doodle had died. To conclude, the short story “The Scarlet Ibis” by James Hurst proclaims the theme that you shouldn’t let your pride and cruelty deprive you of your