55 pages • 1 hour read
Wallace StegnerThe Spectator Bird
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Birds
Content Warning: This section contains references to rape, incest, and eugenics.
As might be expected from a novel with this title, Stegner employs birds as symbols, especially in the first and last pages. The fragility and swiftness of many birds can suggest the transience of life, and the doom-laden opening of The Spectator Bird lists the various birds foraging for food or shelter in Joe’s yard ahead of a looming storm. Before news of two impending deaths arrives, Joe compares himself to some of the birds: the wrens for their testiness, the bush tits for the “sociable” playfulness he once deluded himself he would find in retirement.
Other passages of the book, such as Joe’s analogy of passing through a kitchen without eating a crumb or leaving a trace, suggest that he has always felt (disagreeably) as light as a bird, deprived of the heft and roots of a family history and “drifting” wherever the winds have blown him. He has seen life only from a distance, as if hovering above, never fully engaging with it or creating anything lasting. In the last pages, he finally reconciles himself to the birdlike brevity of human existence, citing the Venerable Bede’s metaphor of a bird flying through a feast hall. Joe alludes to this metaphor earlier in the book but connects it only to lives that fail to live up to their promise. However, Bede’s bird is an analogy for all human lives. If his bird remains hungry, it follows that all humans feel this way at the close of their too-short lives. By the end of the novel, where he cites the Bede’s metaphor in full, Joe seems to acknowledge that his life was just as full as any other—perhaps fuller than most, since he has a “fellow bird” (Ruth) with whom to share his remaining days.
Erik’s Harelip
Seeing Astrid’s estranged husband Erik for the first time, Joe is struck by a strange mark on his face, which he soon recognizes as a “well-repaired but unmistakable harelip” (74). Erik’s lip marked him out for bullying and abuse, even by his mother, who was ashamed to be seen with him in public. Later, he was widely ostracized for other reasons, notably his collaboration with the Nazis; this later stigma also affixed itself to his innocent wife, whose family was already in disgrace because of Count Rødding’s incestuous “experiments” with peasant women. In light of his crimes against his country, Erik’s physical “deformity” evokes the “mark of Cain,” and his failed attempts to disguise it through surgery suggest the impossibility of concealing a sordid past. His mark, which cannot be washed off or cut away, symbolizes the twin scandals that ruined Astrid’s prospects and made the Rødding family a dirty joke in their own country. Joe even speculates that Astrid and Erik might have been forced to “settle” for each other due to their respective blemishes.
The Hipbone Cane
In the book’s first scene, Ben Alexander, a renowned doctor whom Joe reveres as a “godlike” director of others’ lives and destinies, shows him a strange, shillelagh-like cane. The knob that forms the handle appears to be human bone. Ben explains that he had a hip replaced and wanted to keep the hipbone, so he had it incorporated into a wooden walking stick. In his eyes, it is a thing of pride and beauty. To Joe, however, it is unnerving, “grotesque,” and something “any self-respecting dog would bury” (13).
The doctor’s hybrid cane foreshadows the unnatural genetic blendings created by the Rødding men. Just as the Røddings tried to preserve and strengthen their bloodline through incest and methodical adultery, Ben has spliced part of his own body into a foreign object, which he uses as a crutch. Like the Røddings, he cannot see why anyone would have a problem with it. As a symbol of hybridity and scientific aberration, it also carries darker connotations, such as the skin lampshades and other objects of everyday utility fashioned out of human body parts by the Nazis. Stegner reminds readers that, while Ben may be a lovely person, doctors and scientists who “direct lives” have a checkered history.
Related Titles
By Wallace Stegner
