Sexual Frustration In Rara Avis

Throughout “Rara Avis,” the main boy in the story struggles with his sexual frustration and it reflects in how he views situations and people around him. The story gives evidence of the boy’s frustration by how he depicts the bird as a woman. Also it gives detail on how he witnesses the other sexual frustration running through people around him, especially how his views reflect his own frustration inside. The boy at his age is going through a sexually frustrating change in adolescence. In the beginning of the story the boy describes the bird in a very peculiar but sexual way. In this quote: “It looked like a woman or girl perched there on the roof of the furniture store, wings folded like a shawl, long legs naked and exposed beneath a skirt

When the boy flashes back to when the abandoned building burns down he describes it as almost a sanctuary for him and his friends. There they played with knifes and smoked cigarettes but also he says: “I studied pornographic magazines with a fever beating through my body.” Again coming back to his sexual frustration that burned through him. He kept it to himself in his secret hideout, letting the feeling boil in him, making it worse. He feels guilty about his feelings though. When he describes his father’s scent at the scene of the fire as “the odor of armpit and crotch and secret hair, the sematic animal scent of him that had always repelled me-until that moment” a sexual smell that at that moment seemed to comfort him but he starts to welcome the feelings it coincides with. A young twelve year old boy figuring out sex. Then he goes to church after the fire because of his guilt and in the story he says, “In the confessional the priest asked me if I practiced self-pollution” and they boy sat there trying to figure out what to say, knowing he meant masturbation and fighting the “soothing voice of absolution” but lied and told the priest no, again showing his frustration and guilt. His contradictory feelings are getting the best of