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The Scarlet Ibis Theme Essay

“Pride is a wonderful terrible thing, a seed that bears two vines, life and death.” The short story, ``The Scarlet Ibis¨ by James Hurst tells the story of a young boy who was born a cripple and different from everyone else. His name is Doodle. Doodle thought he would die at a young age and was shunned from the family until his older brother decides he would not want to be embarrassed by his crippled brother and decides to help walk, swim, and run. Because of his ignorant pride, it can be shown as a two-sided coin. Pride can have positive and negative effects in many ways. Sometimes good things can happen from being prideful. A reason why pride can be such a helpful thing is that the narrator of the story being so ignorantly prideful in the narrator wanting Doodle to be normal that it caused him to help Doodle learn how to walk"Aw, come on, Doodle. You can do it. Do you want to be different from everybody else when you start school?"(James Hurst 3). Even though this is selfish of the narrator, he believes that teaching Doodle to walk would be giving him a better life. Why the narrator believes it would be a better life is because he's more subconscious about how Doodle is viewed, and if he was not seen as normal he would be embarrassed ¨course. I would teach him to run, to swim, to climb trees, and to fight. He, too, now believed in my infallibility...¨(James Hurst 4)Because the narrator taught Doodle how to walk he became more confident in his abilities to teach Doodle how to do new things. The narrator believes teaching Doodle all of these will make him more normal, thus giving Doodle a better life in the narrator's eyes. The examples above explain why the narrator's pride ended up helping Doodle. However, the ignorant pride that helped Doodle learn to walk also helped lead to Doodle's downfall ¨He had been bleeding from the mouth, and his neck and the front of his shirt were stained a brilliant red¨(James Hurst 6). His older brother's ignorance made it so that he pushed Doodle past what he could handle. Such ignorant pride did not prolong Doodle's life but terminated it. ¨They did not know that I did it for myself; that pride, whose slave I was, spoke to me louder than all their voices and that Doodle walked only because I was ashamed of having a crippled brother¨(James Hurst 3). His older brother did not care about how being different affected Doodle, he only cared about how it affected him. Because the Narrator had this dark streak in him it made it so that when he saw Doodle fail he left him behind. Sometimes Pride can be what demolishes someone from the inside out, and what affects the others around you....