Doodle in the Scarlet Ibis

Many people believe our fate is set in stone from the moment we take our first breath. That we walk a path chosen for us, a path that very few events can alter. This is the case in James Hurst’s short story “The Scarlet Ibis”. In this piece, a young child named Doodle is born into a world where the odds are stacked against him. He is at first helpless, but with the assistance of his brother, eventually learns to cope with his disabilities, and live his life to the fullest. However, in a breaking autumn storm, his seemingly inevitable fate catches up with him, and he dies in his brother’s arms. Hurst uses symbolism, imagery, and foreshadowing to prove that Doodle’s death is unavoidable. To start, Hurst uses symbolism to allude to Doodle’s eventual death. Everyone believes Doodle will die soon after birth. His father even has “Mr. Heath, the carpenter, build a little mahogany coffin for him” (p. 1). A coffin is an obvious symbol of death, and the fact that the coffin was built for a small person expresses the family’s belief that Doodle will not survive for very long. A bit later, Hurst explains that his brother died “in the clove of seasons, summer was dead, but autumn had not yet been born” (p. 1). In this case, he was using the changing in seasons to symbolize the change between the warmth of life and the chilly darkness of death. That Doodle died in this season shows that the fleeting summer in which Doodle was learning also contributed to his timely demise. Near the end, Doodle and his family find a dead scarlet ibis in their yard, beneath the bleeding tree. That day, as Doodle and his brother are running from a sudden thunderstorm, Doodle collapses on to the ground, and the brother holds him in his arms “sheltering [his] fallen scarlet ibis from the heresy of rain” (p. 12). The ibis is used as a symbol to foreshadow Doodle’s own death. The color red could also be seen as a symbol, because Doodle died bleeding from the mouth, with his shirt stained a