Which excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis” most foreshadows Doodle’s death?
In “The Scarlet Ibis,” how does the death of the scarlet ibis foreshadow the death of Doodle?
Read the excerpt from "The Scarlet Ibis.”Within a few months Doodle had learned to walk well and his go-cart was put up in the barn loft (it’s still there) beside his little mahogany coffin. Now, when we roamed off together, resting often, we never turned back until our destination had been reached, and to help pass the time, we took up lying. From the beginning Doodle was a terrible liar and he got me in the habit. Had anyone stopped to listen to us, we would have been sent off to Dix Hill.
Read the excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis.”The lightning was near now, and from fear he walked so close behind me he kept stepping on my heels. The faster I walked, the faster he walked, so I began to run. The rain was coming, roaring through the pines, and then, like a bursting Roman candle, a gum tree ahead of us was shattered by a bolt of lightning. When the deafening peal of thunder had died, and in the moment before the rain arrived, I heard Doodle, who had fallen behind, cry out, “Brother, Brother, don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”
In “The Scarlet Ibis,” Doodle is best symbolized by the bird, the scarlet ibis, because
Read the excerpt from "The Scarlet Ibis.”When he was two, if you laid him on his stomach, he began to try to move himself, straining terribly. The doctor said that with his weak heart this strain would probably kill him, but it didn’t. Trembling, he’d push himself up, turning first red, then a soft purple, and finally collapse back onto the bed like an old worn-out doll. I can still see Mama watching him, her hand pressed tight across her mouth, her eyes wide and unblinking. But he learned to crawl (it was his third winter), and we brought him out of the front bedroom, putting him on the rug before the fireplace. For the first time he became one of us.
Read the excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis.”Daddy, Mama, and I went back to the dining-room table, but we watched Doodle through the open door. He took out a piece of string from his pocket and, without touching the ibis, looped one end around its neck. Slowly, while singing softly “Shall We Gather at the River,” he carried the bird around to the front yard and dug a hole in the flower garden, next to the petunia bed. Now we were watching him through the front window, but he didn’t know it. His awkwardness at digging the hole with a shovel whose handle was twice as long as he was made us laugh, and we covered our mouths with our hands so he wouldn’t hear.When Doodle came into the dining room, he found us seriously eating our cobbler.He was pale and lingered just inside the screen door. “Did you get the scarlet ibis buried?” asked Daddy.Doodle didn’t speak but just nodded his head.
Which excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis” most foreshadows that the narrator will feel regret for something he has done to Doodle?
Read the excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis.”I thought myself pretty smart at many things, like holding my breath, running, jumping, or climbing the vines in Old Woman Swamp, and I wanted more than anything else someone to race to Horsehead Landing, someone to box with, and someone to perch with in the top fork of the great pine behind the barn, where across the fields and swamps you could see the sea. I wanted a brother.
Read the excerpt from “The Scarlet Ibis.”1 It’s strange that all this is still so clear to me, now that the summer has long since fled and time has had its way. 2 A grindstone stands where the bleeding tree stood, just outside the kitchen door, and now if an oriole sings in the elm, its song seems to die up in the leaves, a silvery dust. 3 The flower garden is prim, the house a gleaming white, and the pale fence across the yard stands straight and spruce. 4 But sometimes (like right now), as I sit in the cool, green-draped parlor, the grindstone begins to turn, and time with all its changes is ground away—and I remember Doodle.
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