Broken Winged Birds—interpretations Of Human Alienation In The Painted Bird In The Light Of Trauma Theory

The Painted Bird, the best novel of the Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosinski’s,is a historical allegory reflecting the relationship between individual and society. The unnamed protagonist boy narrates in the first person about his wandering experiences among Eastern European villagers during World War II. Taking the boy’s memory fragments as narrative structure, Kosinski associates the plot of story series with the symbolic measure to express his own version of Holocaust.The Painted Bird presents ‘archetypal’ version of the relation between individual and society. The previous researchers mainly concentrate on the narration mode,picaresque genre and the use of images in the novel. The thesis aims to reveal the theme of alienation in this novel by employing trauma theory coupled with context perusal and analyzing the protagonist’s traumatic causes, symptoms and results as well as the trauma on the collective level. The deracinated self is the main element through Jerzy Kosinski’s novel. The nameless uprooted boy with black skin in the novel turns out to be a hopeless outsider, rejected by the community for difference. He follows a path of evolution, and the process of which is just the transformation process of his self-alienation and alienation with others. The boy is brutalized for being different in every village he comes to and becomes an outlaw on the margins of the society. The boy is seen as a representative of all refugees, all outcasts, all suffering and debased people. The central metaphor of the painted bird expresses a universal story about the intolerance of our society to anything different.In the specific historical condition, the essence of being human is distorted and begins to lose. Both of their psychological needs of pursuing the independent personality and integrating into the collective are not met. No matter how hard they try,they are incapable of eliminating the “defect” of their own images. Like the broken-winged birds failing to fly into their flock, they are abandoned and isolated by the collective. With double identities, they are victims and perpetrators, painted birds and bird painters. Through this thesis, readers can have a further understanding of the absurd behaviors of these marginal figures, and thus have a reflection and introspection on history, society and themselves. Like the central image of the painted bird, he is trying to incorporate himself into society, but in vain due to his different appearance.