The Birds

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1952

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Summary

Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Uncanny Natural World

The narrative’s Gothic horror elements are rooted primarily in its focus on a deep-seated human fear of nature, unknowable and uncontrollable, turning on humanity. Du Maurier first paints a pleasant natural scene in the story’s opening paragraph, wherein the narrator describes the autumn before the wind changes: “Until then the autumn had been mellow, soft. The leaves had lingered on the trees, golden-red, and the hedgerows were still green. The earth was rich where the plow had turned it” (59). This pastoral description and others like it provide sharp contrast with the wintry landscape that is the backdrop for the birds’ unnatural attacks.

When the east wind brings a hard winter with black frost, the birds become inexplicably violent. Like amateur burglars, they test the windows to see whether they can gain access to their prey, the Hockens. After the birds enter through the window in the children’s room to wage battle unsuccessfully, Nat notes to himself that the dead birds left behind are members of various species that “by nature’s law kept to their own flock and their own territory” (64), yet they defied nature’s law to make the assault. Nat notices more instances of the birds acting against the normal rules of the natural world, such as when he goes to the seaside to dispose of the dead birds. It is ebb tide, so the roar of the waves is far away. As he looks at the distant breakers, Nat realizes that they are not white with foam, as he had initially thought, but white with gulls “in line formation, line upon line” (70), like an army preparing for conflict (70). The uncanny sight convinces Nat that there is something happening, “because of the east wind and the weather, something he did not understand” (70).

Nat comes to understand what the birds are doing once he accepts that most of his knowledge about bird behavior is no longer applicable. The terror in the story is partly owing to Nat’s realizations about the birds’ strategy as he watches them split into ranks. He recognizes the birds’ objective, and, no matter how abnormal the birds have become, he notices that their behavior still has discernable patterns. However, no matter how well Nat can predict the birds’ next moves, he will never know why the birds are betraying their natures in order to destroy humanity. He and the readers can only guess—and such unknowability is a classical source of terror.

Individual and Collective Memory

Memory is not only about first-hand experiences; it is also about the story society creates to preserve collective experience of important events. In Nat’s world, however, there is no collective memory or shared story about the start of the war. Nat seems to be the only character who remembers what it was like to survive the Blitz, and after Nat fails to interest either Jim or the Triggs in the birds’ unnatural activities, he inwardly compares that experience to talking with his neighbors about the Blitz: “No one down this end of the country knew what the Plymouth folk had seen and suffered. You had to endure something yourself before it touched you” (68). The people in Cornwall lack not only the first-hand experience of the air-raids but also the collective memory of that event. This lack of memory turns out to be fatal, as Nat’s personal memories are what direct his preparations for withstanding the birds’ brutal assaults on his cottage.

Humans are not the only creatures that can form collective memories in “The Birds.” Through trial and error, the small birds discover the vulnerable places in a house to better gain access, as evidenced during their first attack on the cottage. From their experience at the cottage, the small birds remember where to go the next time they attack, and they somehow share this knowledge with the birds in the upper ranks, like the gulls.

Throughout the narrative, Nat can anticipate the birds’ next moves based on his memories of the Blitz and his knowledge of bird behavior. At the end of the story, as the Hockens listen to the birds banging and clattering outside, he has a strange thought:

Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines (100).

His thought suggests that the birds share a collective memory that directs them on their mission of destruction, just as Nat’s individual memory helps him thwart the birds.

Humanity and War

The theme of war is central to the plot of “The Birds.” The birds are commencing a war, which the narrator and Nat describe with the vocabulary of human wars. Indeed, it is possible to analyze the war theme within two different contexts: World War II and the Cold War provide separate methods for understanding “The Birds” either as a re-enactment of the Blitz or as a critique of Cold War attitudes.

In a World War II context, the birds could be emulating the Luftwaffe flying over Britain to blanket cities, towns, and ports with bombs, killing civilians indiscriminately. This kind of war, a hot war, is comprehensible to Nat because he lived through it. The strategies of the bombers may have been unexpected, but it was at least possible to prepare. Nat is determined to rely on himself because he has a low opinion of the authorities, and that low opinion doubles as criticism of the British government’s response to Nazi attacks on the country during World War II. When he hears airplanes crashing nearby, he thinks that “[s]omeone high up had lost his head” by sending pilots to perform reconnaissance when they are dealing with an enemy that is willing to forfeit its life to carry out an assault (85). Nat ponders other strategies the authorities could use to better effect, like spraying the birds with mustard gas, just as they had done to human combatants in World War II. He imagines “the best brains of the country will be on it”: “[S]cientists, naturalists, technicians, and all those chaps they called the back-room boys” would “be working on the problem now. This was not a job for the government, for the chiefs-of-staff—they would merely carry out the orders of the scientists” (86). There were “back-room boys” working on solutions during World War II, so they could direct the authorities during this war, too. In the end, though, Nat’s past experiences leave him feeling hopeless about the government helping people so far from a large town.

The Cold War is another consideration for the analysis of the war of the birds. The east wind, the hard winter, and the native British birds attacking the British people—all these events have significance within a Cold War context. The east wind brings a freezing, lifeless winter without warning, just like the British worried that a nuclear bomb could come from the east or that Great Britain would become an extension of Soviet Russia. Likewise, the native birds turning on the humans could represent the real threat of British citizens spying on behalf of Soviet Russia. Cold War strategies relied on secrecy and deceit; regular citizens couldn’t reliably identify Soviet agents because the KGB recruited British people to work for them. When Nat tells Mrs. Trigg about his battle in the children’s bedroom, she rationalizes the birds’ behavior by claiming that they were “[f]oreign birds, maybe, from that Arctic circle” (68). Nat insists that they were everyday British birds, so Mrs. Trigg pushes the subject aside since she can’t explain it. She struggles to consider the idea of British birds turning on the humans, just as ordinary citizens struggled to comprehend that native Britons would turn on their neighbors.

The presence of two human wars in “The Birds” invites readers to think critically about those wars as they analyze the birds’ war. Knowledge of both human wars may also help readers imagine what happens to Nat and his family after the narrative leaves them in uncertainty.