Theme Of Pride In The Scarlet Ibis, By James Hurst

Pride is an amazing, horrible thing, A fork in the road that leads to two things, life and death. My parents always told me “Pride comes before a fall”. I never truly understood what that meant before I read this story it means that if you are too confident about yourself, something bad will happen to show you that you are not as good as you think you are. Pride is what the theme is in the story, “The Scarlet Ibis” by James Hurst. The story is about two brothers brothers who are very different. Doodle, the younger brother is very attached to Brother, his older brother, Brother is embarrassed of Doodle because has physical and mental problems that keep him from doing stuff that “normal” people can do. Brothers pride destroyed his relationship with Doodle by abusing Doodle, Forcing Doodle to learn to walk and swim when he didn’t feel safe doing so, and doing something that the doctor had said not to do, killing Doodle.

Brother had sometimes flung Doodle out of the cart he carries him in. “I’d run with him across the ends of the cotton rows and careen him around the corners on two wheels. Sometimes I turned him over” (158). The point being that Doodle was being hurt from getting flung out of his cart. Brother also had plans to kill Doodle. “It was bad enough having an invalid brother, but having one who possibly was not all there was unbearable, so I began to make plans to kill him by smothering him with a pillow” (158). In other Words, Brother was so embarrassed to have Doodle as a Brother, he wanted him dead. Brother abused Doodle all because he was embarrassed for him to be his Brother, to the point of almost killing