For this weeks’ blog post I want to engage with Arturo Arias’s short story, Funeral for a Bird.

What initially struck me was that in the story, the children do not seem fazed about the corpses in the streets; yet all are sad – “one of the littlest boys started to cry” (Arias 52) – about a single, tiny, seemingly insignificant creature, even amidst the rubble and remnants of human life. Arias juxtaposes Máximo’s tenderness toward this bird with his impartial, even annoyed, attitude toward the corpses – for example, when he trips over a “headless body,” and in a “fit of anger, kicked the corpse” (Arias 51). I think that Arias intended to make the reader uncomfortable with this inversion; normally, one would express more empathy and concern with the death of humans than birds. I would be interested to know if Máximo’s “disrespect” toward the corpses, and simultaneous care for the bird, made anybody else feel “discomfort” when reading. Arias also may be expressing how violence and death are seen through the eyes of a child who doesn’t yet understand the world.

On this note, I noticed right away that Arias’s writing had a “childlike” quality. He used short, quick sentences that mimic a child’s way of speaking, as well as simpler language – no words are floral or complicated. I think that Arias is allowing the reader inside Máximo’s head, to perhaps understand violence as a child with little experience of the world might. This technique reminds me of the novel Room by Emma Donoghue, in which a boy named Jack acts as the narrator of the book. At first this way of writing, to me, was scattered and slightly irritating to read but in both Donoghue and Arias’s works, it has the effect of bringing the reader into the mind and experiences of a child.