Historical Analysis Of Jerzy K :: essays research papers

An obscure village in Poland, sheltered from ideas and industrialization, seemed a safe set to store ones most precious valuable a 6-year-old boy. Or so it seemed to the p bents who abandoned their unaccompanied son to protect him from the Nazis in the beginning of Jerzy Kosinskis provocative 1965 novel The Painted Bird. After his withstander Marta dies and her decaying corpse and hut ar accidentally engulfed in flames, the innocent boyish dark-haired, dark-eyed outcast is obliged to trek from village to village in seek of food, shelter, and companionship. Beaten and caressed, chastised and ignored, the unnamed protagonist survives the abuse inflicted by men, women, children and beasts to be reclaim by his parents 7 years later--a cold, indifferent, and callous individual.The protagonists experiences and observations edge that the Holocaust was far too encompassing to be contained within the condensate of Germany with its sordid concentration camps and sociopolitical upheav al. Even remote and disinclined villages of Poland were exposed and sucked into the convolution of conflict. The significance of this point is that it leads to another logical progression Reaching pass on than the Polish villages of 1939, the novels implications extend to all of us. Not only did Hitlers stain seep into even the smallest crannies of the world at that time, it similarly spread beyond limits of time and culture. Modern readers, likewise, are implicated because of our humanity. The careful reader feels a sense of shame at what we, as humans, are capable of through our cultural mentalities. That is one of the more profound aspects of Kosinskis work.It is this sense of connectedness between cultures, people, and ideas that runs through the book continuously. While the backward nonindustrialized villages of Poland seem at first glance to contrast sharply with refine Nazi Germany, Kosinski shows that the two were actually linked by arteries of brutality and bigotry. b oth cultures used some form of religious ideology to enforce a doctrine of hate upon selected groups whom they perceived to be inferior. Totalitarian rhetoric and Nietzschian existentialism replace a hybrid of Catholicism, which in turn replaces medieval credulity as the protagonist is carried from the innards of village life to the heart of undemocratic power.In the first several chapters of the novel the little protagonist is unwaveringly convinced that demons and devils are part of the tangible, physical world. He actually sees them. They are not mythological