The Painted Bird 677the start of war, 12 at its end. Although he survives
the war, he leaves the novel a much-changed char-
acter, one warped and damaged by his experiences.
Kosinski’s novel is episodic in its structure, orga-
nized around the boy’s encounters with new people,
new places, and new trials that he must face. Impor-
tant characters in these episodes include Olga, a
village healer, Lekh, a bird catcher, Garbos, a farmer,
Gavrila and Mitka, soldiers in the Soviet army, and
the Silent One, a war orphan who befriends the boy.
Much like a folktale, the novel pits a young and
helpless protagonist against a cruel world.
Although Jerzy Kosinski was Polish by birth,
The Painted Bird was written in English after his
immigration to the United States. Because Kosinski
was born to Jewish parents and survived the war in
hiding, many people have assumed the novel to be
semi-autobiographical. However, Kosinski insisted
in his preface to the second edition that the book
was entirely a work of fiction, arguing that “Facts
about my life and my origins . . should not be used
to test the book’s authenticity.”
James Wyatt
identity in The Painted Bird
As the nameless narrator of Jerzy Kosinski’s The
Painted Bird seeks shelter in different villages, the
peasants that the boy meets speculate about his
ethnic identity. They consider the dark-haired and
olive-skinned boy “a Gypsy or Jewish stray.” The
novel is set in eastern Europe during World War
II, when the occupying Nazi army made sheltering
a Jew or a Gypsy a crime punishable by death, and
the villagers worry about the consequences of taking
the boy into their communities. In addition, the vil-
lagers often identify the boy according to supersti-
tious traditions: They fear and despise him because
they believe that he possesses dark powers. Marta,
his first protector, believes him to have “Gypsy or
witches’ eyes,” which “could bring crippling illness,
plague or death.” Olga the Wise calls him “the Black
One” and says that his eyes have the power to cast
and remove spells.
In this way, the boy’s identity is determined not
by his inner self but by his outward appearance,
which differs both from that of the villagers and
from the Aryan ideal of the Nazis. The book’s cen-
tral metaphor makes clear this relationship between
one’s appearance and one’s identity within society:
when Lekh, the bird catcher, enraged by Ludmila’s
absence, paints a bird in bright colors and releases
it, the bird tries to return to a flock of its own spe-
cies; however, the flock regards the rainbow-colored
bird as an intruder and viciously attacks it. Likewise,
the boy is tortured and tormented by the villagers
because they believe him to be different from them-
selves. The importance of this metaphor is stressed
as we learn of the trains that pass through the
forests near the villages carrying prisoners destined
for concentration camps—prisoners who have been
deemed subhuman due to their race or religious
background.
The boy himself, separated from his family and
removed from his previous society, becomes unsure
of his identity. As he wanders throughout the war
from village to village, he comes to believe in the view
that the villagers have of him. Taken to an encamp-
ment of German soldiers, the boy stares directly into
the eyes of one of them, believing that this might cast
an evil spell. Later, when the boy witnesses the Kal-
muks’ horrific attack on a village, he believes that the
villagers must be right about his evil nature: “I real-
ized why God would not listen to my prayers, why
I was hung from hooks, why Garbos beat me, why I
lost my speech. I was black. My hair and eyes were as
black as these Kalmuks’. Evidently I belonged with
them in another world.”
As an outsider at the mercy of others, the boy
tries on various identities, attempting to find the key
to power and control in society. He adopts variously
a belief in evil, in the power of prayers of indulgence,
and even in the power that the Germans possess.
He identifies himself most strongly, however, with
members of the Soviet army, the troops that move
in from the east and push the Germans westward.
From them he adopts Gavrila’s Stalinist view of
humanity and Mitka’s philosophy of revenge. Forced
to leave the regiment and to join an orphanage, the
boy clings to this identity, refusing to part with his
Soviet army uniform. He tells the teachers at the
orphanage that his language is Russian and refuses
to learn to read and write in his mother tongue.
Kosinski’s novel suggests that our identities
are malleable, formed by our experiences and by