The Writer As Explorer

What stuck out to me was the distinct difference in the story that is being told by Audubon, and what he is experiencing as he shares his story. Through the course of this letter, he details a time where he was most free, and perhaps most poor. Despite his struggles at this time, I read it as him being most free, before his infidelity left a black mark on him that he couldn’t let go of until he was on his deathbed.

Often times when birds are used in stories, they are a mark of symbolism, and perhaps a parallel. I could see it in the parallel between his relationship with his wife, Lucy, and the scene in which he describes the mated eagles. The line “She would forbid his pursuit of another.” Stood out most prominently for this parallel, especially when one considers that it is in his wife’s absence that Audubon strays.

The birds also are a mark of a happier time in his life, as it is something that both brings him joy and haunts him in the hours of his worsening health, manifesting themselves to him inn a chorus of screaming voices. I think it is also a distinct choice that of all his children to share these stories and secrets with, he chooses not his sons to confide in, but his daughters. Perhaps because they might not be as dismissive or sympathetic to the plight as a man might be, but instead something more stalwart, as infidelity is an issue that troubles women a great deal more than men.

This story reads to me about the price of passion, and how it can consume so utterly that when you are forced to leave it behind it’s like you’ve lost some integral part of yourself, and it is only in death that you realize what exactly it is that you’ve lost – and how you will spend as much time as you have left scrambling to hold onto or share what scattered pieces remain.