Hi, I'm Mr. Sato.
I'm going to teach you about motifs.
A motif is some sort of element that pops up repeatedly in a literary work and means
something.
They have the same idea in music, too.
Here are some other kinds of motifs.
In music, a little snippet of melody might appear and reappear in a musical composition.
But here's a definition from an old literature textbook: "A motif is a recurring feature
(such as a name, an image, or a phrase) in a work of literature.
A motif generally contributes in some way to the theme of a short story, novel, poem,
or play."
When that happens in real life, it doesn't necessarily mean anything.
If you hear repeated references to dogs over the period of a few days, that's probably
just random chance.
Or maybe you really like dogs and so you yourself have sought those out.
But a work of literature is carefully composed.
Very little in a work of literature is accidental or random.
If it's there, it's because the author deliberately put it there.
The author wrote those words with intention.
Here's that definition again.
So, in Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, a book a really, really like, the author drops
a lot of references to masks, the sea, emptiness, seasons, bugs, and birds.
So, l picked one.
We'll talk about the birds.
I found five quotes referring to birds.
First of all, you need to know that Fahrenheit 451 is set in the future.
Books are banned because they give people dangerous ideas, and independent ideas make
people hard to control.
Firemen, as they're called in the novel, unlike fire fighters today, are sent to houses where
contraband books are found and they burn them.
It's a dystopia.
Our main character, Montag, is a fireman who's having doubts about his job and starts to
read a book or two.
In this early scene, the firemen raid a house and start burning books.
Here's the first quote:
A book lit, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering.
In the dim, wavering light, a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather....
What's being compared to the bird?
Is it the book?
It's ambiguous.
I think it's the fire, not the book itself.
The "fluttering" after the book is "lit" is the beautiful, delicate movement of the flames.
So at the beginning of the novel, we can infer that Montag thinks that the destruction of
books is a beautiful thing.
But this metaphor also contains the violent and painful image of a burning pigeon.
And a little lower on the same page, the image continues to be troubling.
The men above were hurling shovelfuls of magazines into the dusty air.
They fell like slaughtered birds and the woman stood below, like a small girl, among the
bodies.
Now, the metaphorical birds are being slaughtered.
They're symbols now.
We see the bodies of the dead birds.
We see the pages fluttering in the air.
The fireman is now seeing that they are destroying something of value.
And because the woman whose house is being destroyed is watching this, we see it for
a moment through her innocent, childlike eyes; we imagine her grief at the magazines' and
books' destruction.
The birds now represent living ideas, just like the birds in this simile were once living.
He now sees that he's destroying ideas.
But because the image is a simile, and metaphorical language exists at a level of abstraction,
we aren't seeing what he's thinking; we're seeing what he's feeling.
So, spoiler alert, the fireman decides that burning books is wrong and starts to collaborate
with people who are fighting to keep books and their ideas alive.
Eventually, he's busted by the fire chief, who says:
Old Montag wanted to fly near the sun and now that he's burnt his damn wings, he wonders
why.
If you know your Greek mythology, you know who he's referring to.
That's Icarus, who was able to fly with wings his father built for him using wax and bird
feathers.
His father said, "Icarus," don't fly too high now."
But youthful, impulsive Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted, and he fell to
his death.
That's what the fire chief is saying is happening to Montag.
He wanted to fly like the birds, but now look what's happened.
He got carried away with his newfound freedom and now is going to lose everything.
Here, let's pause to look at why birds.
Birds fly up in the sky over the heads of regular humans like us.
They're both delicate and powerful at the same time.
They ascend to the sky, upward, like angels.
Humans look up and feel envy at their freedom.
The law is the sun in this metaphor.
The birds, and Icarus (Montag), are educated people who have accessed the ideas in books
and are flying over the heads of ordinary people, who in this book are portrayed as
empty-headed idiots.
Do you see the pattern of meaning yet?
This motif of birds is pointing us towards a theme: "Books and the ideas in them are
precious, maybe even sacred, because they elevate humans to a higher plane of thought.
They allow you to think thoughts you would never have thought up on your own.
They allow you to see things you ordinarily wouldn't, like Icarus is able to fly.
And yet, knowledge and ideas are vulnerable to the powers of ignorance and fear, so they
must be defended."
That's a theme.
Let's go on.
Later in the book, Montag sees something different in a burning book.
Now, he sees a beautiful bird in the book itself, not in the flame that is destroying
it.
The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.
Even in death, the birds, or books, are beautiful with their red and yellow feathers.
But they're leaping and dancing as they are dying, as they are being roasted alive.
Montag sees the act as a kind of killing, killing something of beauty and value.
And that ties in perfectly with our theme about books being precious and vulnerable.
And you folks who like mythology, what is the mythological creature who burns up in
a fire then rises again, newly-born, from the ashes of its predecessor?
Yep, it's the phoenix.
In case you didn t catch it, the fire chief makes the connection explicit on page 163.
...a damn silly bird called a Phoenix....
The phoenix, as you may know, is sort of immortal, in that it never completely dies, but regenerates
into a new phoenix when the previous one is destroyed in flame.
Bradbury is saying that the precious and vulnerable books, and the ideas in them, will never be
permanently destroyed, because as people value them, they will keep those stories and their
ideas alive.
Get it?
That's how motifs work.
The author drops a reference in the literary work more than once, and you examine the references,
see how they connect, and infer a meaning or a theme.
A motif doesn't have to use the exact same word repeatedly.
My first quote didn't use the word, "bird" at all.
It referred to a "pigeon."
My third quote just referred to "wings."
So you have to be alert when reading.
When you notice something recurring, make a note, maybe a marginal note or maybe just
a mental note.
If it recurs a third time, ding ding ding, you have a winner!
Tell 'em what they've won, Johnny!
You can write a whole essay based on those three quotes.
More quotes is better than a few, though, so you can pick the ones that are most relevant
to your theme.
Being able to notice patterns, like motifs, is a real life skill.
If you can identify a motif, you can notice recurring images in the real world.
Remember how I said at the beginning that it could just be random and meaningless?
Well, it also might not be.
Let's say a teenager notices a pattern of adults talking a certain way about her, or
using certain words that diminish her in some way, she might be able to infer that those
adults don't view her with respect and are not likely to take her seriously or give her
full credit for her accomplishments.
(I think of this statement by Malcolm X.)
And then she could wisely take any advice from those people and hold it up to the stink-ometer
before taking it to heart.
Just for example.
All right, that's all.
Happy motif hunting.