The Scarlet Ibis

The scarlet ibis, a brilliantly red tropical bird, symbolizes Doodle. Depicted as beautiful yet fragile, both Doodle and the scarlet ibis become victims of destructive, external forces. A severe storm leads to the ibis’s death, just as the narrator’s cruel pride leads to Doodle’s. Although Mama, Daddy, and Aunt Nicey regard the bird with suspicion and as a curiosity, its death evokes reverence: “Even death did not mar its grace, for it lay on the earth like a broken vase of red flowers, and we stood around it, awed by its exotic beauty” (52). When Doodle empathically ensures the bird a proper burial, his family quietly mocks him from a distance. The narrative depicts Doodle’s connection to the bird as another of the boy’s distinctively isolated characteristics.

The first description of Doodle compares his appearance to an ibis from the onset: “He seemed all head, with a tiny body which was red and shriveled like an old man’s” (48). In death, the similarities between Doodle and the bird are again explicitly tied to physical attributes. The narrator notes the ibis’s “long graceful neck” and its bright red color and later describes the Doodle’s neck as “unusually long and slim” (52) and his shirt “stained a brilliant red” (53) with his blood. The link between the ibis and boy is cemented at the end of the story as the narrator describes his dead brother as “my fallen scarlet ibis” (53). However, the narrator likens his brother to the fallen bird in more than physicality. The fragility of the bird’s unique beauty is what resonates. Doodle, akin to the rare, out-of-place bird, also dies beneath red vegetation. In this context, the color red symbolizes the death of beauty.