Historical Analysis Of Jerzy K :: essays research papers

An obscure village in Poland, sheltered from ideas and industrialization, seemed a safe place to store ones most loved valuable a 6-year-old boy. Or so it seemed to the p arents who abandoned their only news to protect him from the Nazis in the beginning of Jerzy Kosinskis provocative 1965 novel The piebald Bird. After his guardian Marta dies and her decaying corpse and hut are accident completelyy engulfed in flames, the innocent young dark-haired, dark-eyed outcast is obliged to trek from village to village in search of food, shelter, and companionship. Beaten and caressed, chastised and ignored, the unnamed ally survives the abuse inflicted by men, women, children and beasts to be reclaimed by his parents 7 years later--a cold, indifferent, and callous individual.The protagonists experiences and observations demonstrate that the Holocaust was far too encompassing to be contained within the capsule of Germany with its sordid concentration camps and sociopolitical upheaval. Eve n remote and backwards villages of Poland were exposed and sucked into the maelstrom of conflict. The significance of this point is that it leads to another logical progress Reaching further 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 sphere at that time, it also spread beyond limits of time and culture. Modern readers, likewise, are implicated because of our humanity. The conscientious reader feels a sense of shame at what we, as humans, are capable of through our cultural mentalities. That is one of the more than profound aspects of Kosinskis work.It is this sense of connectedness between cultures, people, and ideas that runs through the harbor continuously. While the backward nonindustrialized villages of Poland seem at first glance to telephone circuit sharply with civilized Nazi Germany, Kosinski shows that the two were actually linked by arteries of brutality and bigo try. Both cultures used some form of religious ideology to enforce a doctrine of hate upon selected groups whom they perceived to be inferior. totalistic rhetoric and Nietzschian existentialism replace a hybrid of Catholicism, which in tour of duty replaces medieval superstition as the protagonist is carried from the innards of village life sentence to the heart of totalitarian power.In the first several chapters of the novel the miniature protagonist is firmly convinced that demons and devils are part of the tangible, physical world. He actually sees them. They are not mythological