Consider the chapter "The Captive".
What is the significance of the bird? Why is Yorick so broken up over a captive bird? Is it ignorance? Does he feel sympathy for those who do not travel? He calls the cage a dungeon - typically associated with people, not animals. Or is he comparing the caged bird to his potential imprisonment since he lost his passport and France and England are at war? Or is it a representation of him being lost? Why is Yorick unable to free the bird?
What are your thoughts and why?
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2 comments:
I'm not entirely sure what the bird truly represents (if there even is something that it truly means). I saw the caged bird almost as a bit of twisted humor. Just before the bird comes in, Yorick mentions the "Bastile," which was used for imprisoning humans (pg. 59). Yet Yorick speaks of it rather nonchalantly, even going as far as to say that a man may come out of it "a better and wiser man than he went in," and talking of its possible luxuries (pen, paper, etc.) It is when he sees the bird in the cage that he becomes impassioned-- he can't stand the sight of the caged bird so severely that he wrenches the cage doors open with his hands and lets the bird fly free. Such an intense response to the bird seemed over-exaggerated, which is why I figured it some kind of humor. It was, I thought, as if to say "Yorick doesn't really care about imprisoned men, but the sight of a caged bird will drive him into a frenzy. Ha-ha." (Though I may be totally off in this reading of the text.)
I agree with Cameron in his reading of this chapter as an interlude of "twisted humor". It is certainly evident that the imprisoned bird offers an interesting contrast with Yorick's previous imagination of life in the Bastile. It also seems clear that the bird prompts Yorick's fantasy of the despondent captive. What is bitterly funny here is the varying level of pity Yorick feels for imprisoned or slavish things. Yorick says of his encounter with the bird: "I never had my affections more tenderly awakened" (60). Similarly, the image of the captive prompts Yorick to "burst into tears" after his "heart began to bleed" (61). The exaggerated pathos here clashes sharply with Yorick's attempt to imagine "millions of [his] fellow creatures born to no inheritance but slavery," which results in this weak reaction: "but finding, however affecting the picture was...I could not bring it near me, and...the multitude of sad groups in it did but distract me" (61). Yorick's inability to frame his compassion beyond the scope of the individual is a trenchant, though humorous (because of its supposed exaggeration), critique of similar egoistic tendencies both in Yorick and his apparent target audience. The idea that a captive bird can be more moving than the plight of millions of people is hilarious because of its pretended absurdity. The idea is twisted, however, because in reality the misery of an individual animal is often more moving than the suffering of millions.
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