The Owl that Visits Frederick

[grace]

At the end of the story when the Frederick sees the owl, does the bird symbolize anything?  I was thinking that the owl might represent Werner.  "It swivels its neck and blinks its yellow eyes and in her head roars a single though: You've come for me...Then it goes: three audible wing beats and the darkness swallows it."

[eliasrust]

I agree with you in some way. I think that it could symbolize Werner, or it could symbolize the memories that he had forgotten. I think that everyone can agree that something happened to Frederick when he saw that owl, and it triggered some response in his mind. That doesn't mean that he remembers everything all at once, but the owl did trigger some type of memory response, or some type of emotion.

[anthonywang]

I agree with Grace because Owl’s are a symbol for guardians, which is fitting for Werner and Frederick. Owls and birds are symbolic messengers of those that have passed on. For example, On the last page, Marie-Laure contemplates "all the light we cannot see" and wonders if our souls fill the world around us just like radio waves and text communications. She thinks: "That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terms, like starlings" For me, this is a strong reference that Werner's soul visited Frederick and awoke him back to life. Although Frederick did not respond to the sighting of the owl, I believe that some part of Frederick survived and his soul was still there. I was so convinced that when Frederick saw the owl he would return to himself and be reminded of his bird watching hobby but I was wrong. In a conventional novel, the Audubon prints would retrigger Frederick’s memory, and he’d emerge from his mental deterioration—but once again Doerr is committed to portraying the harsh realities of life, and so he rarely fulfills the conventional demands of plot and story arc. Art and communication have their limits: as hard as the characters try to connect with one another, their efforts are sometimes—as in this case—in vain. The owl in this scene might have reminded Frederick of his old bird watching hobby, but here it makes no lasting difference to his mental state, and only increases his mother’s pain.