Calling all readers: Quiz on The Painted Bird (Jerzy Kosinski)

Dr. Peter A. Hempel                                                                        Spring 1988

Intro. to Life and Thought 101

Quiz

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski

Essay -- 30 minutes

1.    In his poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats posits that:

 “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Yet musing along similar lines, don marquis’ archy, in “the hen and the oriole,” (in the collection of poems, Archy and Mehitabel) concludes, perhaps somewhat ambiguously:

“. . . beauty always

gets the best of

it be beautiful boss

a thing of beauty is a

joy forever

be handsome boss and let

who will be clever is

the sad advice

of your ugly little friend

          archy”

Which tack would you feel more closely represents the overall vision presented in The Painted Bird? Explain and explore with references to specific incidents and details within the work.

          (10 minutes)

2.    Perhaps the most famous single line from Holocaust literature is Anne Frank's conclusion: “In my heart, I believe that people are good.”  Do you feel that Kosinski would agree? 

Write out an imaginary discussion between Kosinski and Frank on the issue of the fundamental nature of man.

(10 minutes)

3.    The events within the course of the book (“Thus my life was spent alternately praying and being beaten.”) come to serve as a metaphysical model which leads Kosinski to question not only the more conventional precepts of religion, as with this ironic “crucifixion”—

“When the point was deep into the entrails of the victim, the men lifted the stake, together with the impaled man upon it and planted it in a previously dug hole. They left him there to die slowly.

“Now hanging under the ceiling I could almost see the man and hear him howling into the night, trying to raise to the indifferent sky his arms which hung by the bloated trunk of his body.”

—but also leaves him to question even the desirability of a less cold order. When he is at last reunited with his parents after the war, he discovers that:

“I could not readily accept the idea of . . . having to obey people, not because they were stronger and could hurt me, but because they were my parents and had rights which no one could take away from them.”

It is clear that by the end of the book, the narrator has lost touch with all normal human and social values. In his code of sheer vengeance and his ruthless night ramblings he has, quite simply, “gone off the deep end.” 

Please explain briefly, citing specific details from the work, the failings—moral and literary—that lead the narrator (and/or the author) thus awry.

(10 minutes)

4.    Optional extra credit question (may require continuing on to New York).

Kosinski has achieved great literary stature in our society, with The Painted Bird being his best-known and most important work. Structurally, for example, it can be neatly compared to another American classic, Huckleberry Finn, its emotional intensity begs comparison with Last Exit to Brooklyn, and its musings on what Shakespeare called “this too, too sullied flesh” can make us think only of the deep questions posed by Hamlet.

At what grade level in school, then, should The Painted Bird be taught to our children? Explain forthrightly and undefensively.

(10 minutes to 2 hours depending on train speed.)