35 pages • 1 hour read
Daphne du MaurierThe Birds
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Personification
The literary device of personification appears whenever an animal, object, or natural force takes on human qualities. The device works well in the narrative because it enhances the story’s horror element, particularly as it involves the idea of birds behaving like humans to inflict violence on actual humans.
The narrator and Nat often describe the birds in military terms; the nonhuman creatures have the human ability to form into ranks and test different methods of attack. As Nat and his family are hunkered down in the fortified cottage, Nat listens and realizes the “shuffling” and “tapping” of the birds has abated, so it seems the birds are no longer scoping out his building. He thinks, “They’ve got reasoning powers, […] they know it’s hard to break in here. They’ll try elsewhere. They won’t waste their time with us” (85). His eerie assessment of the birds’ “reasoning powers” indicates he has developed a connection with the birds and how they think.
There are other, similar moments when he thinks of the birds’ self-organizing, their complex premeditation, and their capacity for intellectual growth—all qualities usually possessed by humans. Likewise, as the violence escalates and the birds hone their strategies, Nat considers what memories drove them to violence, as if they are like the humans who prepared. However, unlike the humans, the birds benefit from a collective memory and can synchronize with each other to achieve their objective.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a device in which the narrative offers a hint of upcoming plot events. In “The Birds,” such hints almost always create a sense of foreboding and contribute to the story’s uncanny atmosphere. From the first sentence, the narrator foreshadows the story’s Gothic plot by bluntly telling the readers that something strange is happening: “On December the third the wind changes overnight and it was winter” (59). There is also foreshadowing in Nat’s birdwatching observations during his midday break. For Nat, the best time of year for birdwatching is autumn, when birds that can’t migrate seem restless and purposeless. However, on the day before the abrupt arrival of winter, the birds are behaving oddly, as they are more restless and more numerous than is common. When Nat lies in bed that night—as the night the wind changes, bringing the hard winter—he “stayed wakeful, watchful, aware of misgiving without cause” (61). In Gothic horror, there is often at least one character who has a strong intuitive sense that warns readers of a looming, unknown danger. In this story, that character is Nat, whose inexplicable feeling of dread foreshadows the uncanny events to come and creates suspense.
Point of View
There is very little exposition in “The Birds” because, since the narrator so closely follows Nat’s perspective, readers experience events with Nat; as a result, readers know only what Nat knows. And even then, the narrator does not reveal the totality of Nat’s inner world. Readers must collect clues as they progress through the narrative, watching Nat assess events as they happen—assessments that sometimes recruit memories of similar situations (i.e., the Blitz). Readers can also see when Nat makes mistakes and what he learns from those mistakes. Like the birds, who test different tactics before the war begins in earnest, Nat learns through trial and error the actions he must take to protect his home and keep his family alive.
Du Maurier harnesses various aspects of this literary device to amplify the story’s horror elements. For example, the narrator’s focus on Nat’s immediate point of view forges a connection between the readers and the protagonist, allowing readers to vicariously experience the birds as Nat does—with a visceral sense of foreboding, fear, and anxiety. As Nat learns what to do in these unprecedented circumstances, readers observe his hopes of deliverance rise and fall with each passing moment. One disappointment Nat suffers is when he thinks he sees navy ships coming but soon realizes he is seeing his enemies, the gulls, rising from the sea to launch a new assault. Nat’s fleeting hope is palpable in his line of thinking, and readers witness his sickening loss of hope when his sight clears.
Ambiguity
The device of ambiguity, which is bound up intimately with the narrative point of view, emphasizes how little the readers can know about Nat or about the birds’ motivation. The third-person narrator leaves many details about Nat unknown, and readers catch glimpses of Nat’s inner life only when he connects memories to current events or when he interacts with people who dismiss his concerns. Ambiguity’s most dramatic effect in the narrative, though, is to indirectly enhance the mood of horror by keeping readers in a suspended state of uncertainty and leaving room for their imaginations. An example is when Nat wonders why the land birds do not feed while the gulls are resting at ebb tide:
Then he remembered. They were gorged with food. They had eaten their fill during the night. That was why they did not move this morning…
No smoke came from the chimneys of the council houses. He thought of the children who had run across the fields the night before.
‘I should have known,’ he thought, ‘I ought to have taken them home with me’ (97-98).
This passage leaves much unsaid, and the ellipsis indicates a thought trailing off because it is too terrible for Nat to complete. But the next lines imply there is a connection between the gorged birds and the children at the council houses. In these few ambiguous sentences, readers can form their own conclusions, and those imaginings may be more sickening, more devastating than the narrator’s straightforward description ever could be.
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By Daphne du Maurier
