Imagine that a boy and the person that boy looked up to most, his hero, go up into their barn loft. The boy’s hero, his brother, shows him a small mahogany box and tells the boy that the box was meant to hold the frail body of the boy, were he to die in infancy. Then the brother tells the boy to touch the box. This is the way that the unnamed narrator treats his younger, physically disabled brother in James Hurst’s short story “The Scarlet Ibis”. In this story, The narrator tells about the childhood he shared with his younger brother, that ended when the narrator’s actions led to the younger brother, who was called Doodle’s, death. I firmly believe that the narrator is responsible for Doodle’s death, because the narrator knew that Doodle wasn’t physically able to do the things he could, but forced him to anyway out of sheer selfishness and didn’t accept him for it.…show more content… Proof of this is found on the first page of this story, where the narrator states “It was bad enough having an invalid brother, but having one who possibly was not all there was unbearable, so I began making plans to kill him by smothering him with a pillow” This quote shows that the narrator, instead of wanting to help Doodle and love him, disability or not, planned to kill him so that he wouldn’t have to live with an invalid brother. A person must be sympathetic to others, especially family, and give them a chance to show what they can or cannot do. The narrator didn’t care about letting Doodle have a chance, he wanted to kill Doodle so that he wouldn’t have to live with the “inconvenience” of having an invalid younger
