Birdsong

by

Sebastian Faulks

Stephen Wraysford Character Analysis

The protagonist of Birdsong and Elizabeth Benson’s grandfather. Stephen is first introduced as young man in France in 1910. He is sent by his British employer to study textile manufacturing in the town of Amiens, where he boards with René Azaire. Stephen is an orphan; he has never met his father and his mother abandons him shortly after he is born, leaving him in the care of his grandfather. When Stephen’s grandfather is sent to prison for a petty crime, he is sent to an institution. A social reformer becomes interested in him and encourages his education, but Stephen is never loved, and by the time he reaches Amiens, his life has little direction. Stephen quickly falls in love with Isabelle, René’s wife, and they begin a steamy affair. Isabelle fills a void in Stephen’s life that he has long since ignored, but after she leaves him, he is worse off than when he started. He initially finds distraction in World War I, but as the war drags on Stephen becomes filled with hate. He despises the German soldiers he fights against, and he even despises his own men. Stephen’s sees the worst of himself reflected in the men he commands, and he watches as they commit unspeakable acts. Stephen finds solace in his friendship with Michael Weir, a fellow soldier, but when Weir is killed by an enemy sniper, Stephen finds it difficult to go on. His heart is further broken when Isabelle falls in love with a Prussian soldier, Max, and while he grows a great fondness for Isabelle’s sister, Jeanne, Stephen never again feels the passion he experiences with Isabelle in Amiens. As the war rages on, Stephen begins to soften towards his men, and when he is trapped in a collapsed tunnel at the end of the war and saved by a German soldier, he embraces his enemy. Stephen records his story in an encrypted journal, and while his life is ultimately short and full of pain, his granddaughter, Elizabeth, is able to learn from him. Because of Stephen’s story, Elizabeth gains a new understanding of her own modern life and a deep appreciation for the cost of war.

Stephen Wraysford Quotes in Birdsong

The Birdsong quotes below are all either spoken by Stephen Wraysford or refer to Stephen Wraysford. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
History and the Future Theme Icon
).
Part One: France 1910 Quotes

“This morning I was out doing some errands in the town. There was a window open in a house near the cathedral and someone was playing the piano.”

Madame Azaire’s voice was cool and low […].

Monsieur and Madame Bérard looked startled. It was evidently not the kind of thing they had expected. Azaire spoke with the soothing voice of one use to such fancies. “And what was the tune, my dear?”

“I don’t know. I had never heard it before. It was just a tune like Beethoven or Chopin.”

“I doubt it was Beethoven if you failed to recognize it, Madame,” said Bérard

gallantly. “It was one of those folksongs, I’ll bet you anything.”

Related Characters: Isabelle Azaire (speaker), René Azaire (speaker), Monsieur Bérard (speaker), Stephen Wraysford, Madame Bérard
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

Yet despite her formality toward him and her punctilious ease of manner, Stephen sensed some other element in what he had termed the pulse of her. It was impossible to say through which sense he had the impression, but somehow, perhaps only in the tiny white hairs on the skin of her bare arm or the blood he had seen rise beneath the light freckles of her cheekbones, he felt certain there was some keener physical life than she was actually living in the calm, restrictive rooms of her husband’s house with its oval door handles of polished china and its neatly inlaid parquet floors.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford, Isabelle Azaire, René Azaire
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:

Azaire’s gaze had filled with something like amusement. “I don’t’ like to think of you having some kind of fit. I could easily—.”

“For goodness’ sake, René,” said Madame Azaire. “He’s told you there’s nothing to worry about. Why don’t you just leave him alone?”

Azaire’s fork made a loud clatter as he laid it down on his plate. For a moment his face had an expression of panic, like that of the schoolboy who suffers a sudden reverse and can’t understand the rules of behaviour by which his rival has won approval. Then he began to smile sardonically, as though to indicate that really he knew best and that his decision not to argue further was temporary indulgence he was granting his juniors. He turned to his wife with a teasing lightness of manner.

Related Characters: Isabelle Azaire (speaker), René Azaire (speaker), Stephen Wraysford
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:

“And have you heard your minstrel again in your wanderings in the town, my dear?”

She looked down at her plate. “I was not wandering, René. I was doing errands.”

“Of course, my dear. My wife is a mysterious creature, Monsieur,” he said to Stephen. “No one knows—like the little stream in the song—whither she flows or where her end will be.”

Related Characters: Isabelle Azaire (speaker), René Azaire (speaker), Stephen Wraysford
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:

Sometimes from the safety of the sitting room he would fix his eyes on the group and the vital, unspeaking figure of Madame Azaire. He didn’t ask himself if she was beautiful, because the physical effect of her presence made the question insignificant. Perhaps in the harshest judgement of the term she was not. While everything was feminine about her face, her nose was slightly larger than fashion prescribed; her hair had more different shades of brown and gold and red than most women would have wanted. For all the lightness of her face, its obvious strength of character overpowered conventional prettiness. But Stephen made no judgements; he was motivated by compulsion.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford, Isabelle Azaire
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:

René Azaire had no suspicions of what was happening in his house. He had allowed his feelings toward Isabelle to become dominated by anger and frustration at his physical impotence and by what he subsequently experienced as a kind of emotional powerlessness toward her. He did not love her, but he wanted her to more responsive toward him. He sensed that she felt sorry for him and this infuriated him further; if she could not love him then at least she should be frightened of him.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford, Isabelle Azaire, René Azaire
Page Number: 75
Explanation and Analysis:

“I don’t want this.” Isabelle shook her head. The words came from her mouth without thought or calculation in their purity of feeling. “I don’t know what to do or how to behave now. I could be happy in the simplest way, like any other woman with a family of her own, without this terrible pain I’ve caused. I won’t listen to ether of you. Why should I? How do I know that you love me, Stephen? How can I tell?” Her voice fell to the low, soft note Stephen had heard when she spoke on his first evening in the house. It was a beautiful sound to his ears: pleading and vulnerable, but with a sense of strength in its own rightness. “And you, René, why should I trust you when you have given me so little reason even to like you?”

Related Characters: Isabelle Azaire (speaker), Stephen Wraysford, René Azaire
Page Number: 92-3
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Two: France 1916 Quotes

“No one in England knows what this is like. If they could see the way these men live they would not believe their eyes. This is not a war, this is an exploration of how far men can be degraded. I am deeply curious to see how much further it can be taken; I want to know. I believe that it has barely started. I believe that far worse things than we have seen will be authorized and will be carried out by millions of boys and men like my Tipper and your Firebrace. There is no depth to which they can’t be driven.”

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford (speaker), Jack Firebrace, Michael Weir, Tipper
Page Number: 145
Explanation and Analysis:

“I know you go out on patrol with [the men] and bind up their wounds and so on. But do you love them? Will you give your life for them?”

Stephen felt himself closely scrutinized. He could have said, “Yes, sir,” and closed the conversation; but Gray’s informal hectoring manner, although unsettling, permitted frankness.

“No,” he said. “I suppose not.”

“I thought so,” said Gray, with a small triumphant laugh. “Is that because you value your own life too much? You think it’s worth more than some simple footsoldier’s?”

“Not at all. I’m a simple footsoldier myself, don’t forget. It was you who promoted me. It’s because I don’t value my life enough. I have no sense of the scale of the sacrifices. I don’t know what anything is worth.”

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford (speaker), Captain Gray  (speaker)
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis:

If night would fall, the earth might resume its natural process, and perhaps, in many years’ time, what had happened during daylight could be viewed as an aberration, could be comprehended within the rhythm of a normal life. At the moment it seemed to Stephen to be the other way about: that this was the new reality, the world in which they were now condemned to live, and that the pattern of the seasons, of night and day, was gone.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford
Page Number: 224-5
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Four: France 1917 Quotes

Stephen felt, at the better moments, the love for them that Gray had demanded. Their desperate courage, born from necessity, was nevertheless endearing. The grimmer, harder, more sardonic they became, the more he cared for them. Still he could not quite believe them; he could not comprehend the lengths to which they allowed themselves to be driven. He had been curious to see how far they could be taken, but his interest had slackened when he saw the answer: that there were no boundaries they would not cross, no limits to what they would endure.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford, Captain Gray 
Page Number: 270
Explanation and Analysis:

Stephen felt himself overtaken by a climatic surge of feeling. It frightened him because he thought it would have some physical issue, in spasm or bleeding to death. Then he saw that what he felt was not an assault but a passionate affinity. It was for the rough field running down to the trees and for the path going back into the village, where he could see the tower of the church: these and the forgiving distance of the sky were not separate, but part of one creation, and he too, still by any sane judgement a young man, by the repeated tiny pulsing of his blood, was one with them.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford
Page Number: 348
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Five: England 1978-79 Quotes

I do not know what I have done to live in this existence. I do not know what any of us did to tilt the world into this unnatural orbit. We came here only for a few months. No child or future generation with ever know what this was like. They will never understand. When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them. We will talk and sleep and go about our business like hum beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford (speaker), Elizabeth Benson
Page Number: 403
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Six: France 1918 Quotes

Gray stood up and came around the desk. “Think of the words on that memorial, Wraysford. Think of those stinking towns and foul bloody villages whose names will be turned into some bogus glory by fat-arsed historians who have sat in London. We were there. As our punishment of God knows what, we were there, and our men did in each of those disgusting places. I hate their names. I hate the sound of them and the thought of them, which is why I will not bring myself to remind you. But listen.” He put his face close to Stephen’s. “There are four words they will chisel beneath them at the bottom. Four words that people will look at one day. When they read the other words they will want to vomit. When they read these, they will bow their heads, just a little. ‘Final advance and pursuit.’ Don’t tell me you don’t want to put your name to those words.”

Related Characters: Captain Gray  (speaker), Stephen Wraysford
Page Number: 409
Explanation and Analysis:

Levi looked at this wild-eyed figure, half-demented, his brother’s killer. For no reason he could tell, he found that he had opened his own arms in turn, and the two men fell upon each other’s shoulders, weeping at the bitter strangeness of their human lives.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford, Lieutenant Levi
Page Number: 463
Explanation and Analysis:
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Stephen Wraysford Quotes in Birdsong

The Birdsong quotes below are all either spoken by Stephen Wraysford or refer to Stephen Wraysford. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
History and the Future Theme Icon
).
Part One: France 1910 Quotes

“This morning I was out doing some errands in the town. There was a window open in a house near the cathedral and someone was playing the piano.”

Madame Azaire’s voice was cool and low […].

Monsieur and Madame Bérard looked startled. It was evidently not the kind of thing they had expected. Azaire spoke with the soothing voice of one use to such fancies. “And what was the tune, my dear?”

“I don’t know. I had never heard it before. It was just a tune like Beethoven or Chopin.”

“I doubt it was Beethoven if you failed to recognize it, Madame,” said Bérard

gallantly. “It was one of those folksongs, I’ll bet you anything.”

Related Characters: Isabelle Azaire (speaker), René Azaire (speaker), Monsieur Bérard (speaker), Stephen Wraysford, Madame Bérard
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

Yet despite her formality toward him and her punctilious ease of manner, Stephen sensed some other element in what he had termed the pulse of her. It was impossible to say through which sense he had the impression, but somehow, perhaps only in the tiny white hairs on the skin of her bare arm or the blood he had seen rise beneath the light freckles of her cheekbones, he felt certain there was some keener physical life than she was actually living in the calm, restrictive rooms of her husband’s house with its oval door handles of polished china and its neatly inlaid parquet floors.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford, Isabelle Azaire, René Azaire
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:

Azaire’s gaze had filled with something like amusement. “I don’t’ like to think of you having some kind of fit. I could easily—.”

“For goodness’ sake, René,” said Madame Azaire. “He’s told you there’s nothing to worry about. Why don’t you just leave him alone?”

Azaire’s fork made a loud clatter as he laid it down on his plate. For a moment his face had an expression of panic, like that of the schoolboy who suffers a sudden reverse and can’t understand the rules of behaviour by which his rival has won approval. Then he began to smile sardonically, as though to indicate that really he knew best and that his decision not to argue further was temporary indulgence he was granting his juniors. He turned to his wife with a teasing lightness of manner.

Related Characters: Isabelle Azaire (speaker), René Azaire (speaker), Stephen Wraysford
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:

“And have you heard your minstrel again in your wanderings in the town, my dear?”

She looked down at her plate. “I was not wandering, René. I was doing errands.”

“Of course, my dear. My wife is a mysterious creature, Monsieur,” he said to Stephen. “No one knows—like the little stream in the song—whither she flows or where her end will be.”

Related Characters: Isabelle Azaire (speaker), René Azaire (speaker), Stephen Wraysford
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:

Sometimes from the safety of the sitting room he would fix his eyes on the group and the vital, unspeaking figure of Madame Azaire. He didn’t ask himself if she was beautiful, because the physical effect of her presence made the question insignificant. Perhaps in the harshest judgement of the term she was not. While everything was feminine about her face, her nose was slightly larger than fashion prescribed; her hair had more different shades of brown and gold and red than most women would have wanted. For all the lightness of her face, its obvious strength of character overpowered conventional prettiness. But Stephen made no judgements; he was motivated by compulsion.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford, Isabelle Azaire
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:

René Azaire had no suspicions of what was happening in his house. He had allowed his feelings toward Isabelle to become dominated by anger and frustration at his physical impotence and by what he subsequently experienced as a kind of emotional powerlessness toward her. He did not love her, but he wanted her to more responsive toward him. He sensed that she felt sorry for him and this infuriated him further; if she could not love him then at least she should be frightened of him.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford, Isabelle Azaire, René Azaire
Page Number: 75
Explanation and Analysis:

“I don’t want this.” Isabelle shook her head. The words came from her mouth without thought or calculation in their purity of feeling. “I don’t know what to do or how to behave now. I could be happy in the simplest way, like any other woman with a family of her own, without this terrible pain I’ve caused. I won’t listen to ether of you. Why should I? How do I know that you love me, Stephen? How can I tell?” Her voice fell to the low, soft note Stephen had heard when she spoke on his first evening in the house. It was a beautiful sound to his ears: pleading and vulnerable, but with a sense of strength in its own rightness. “And you, René, why should I trust you when you have given me so little reason even to like you?”

Related Characters: Isabelle Azaire (speaker), Stephen Wraysford, René Azaire
Page Number: 92-3
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Two: France 1916 Quotes

“No one in England knows what this is like. If they could see the way these men live they would not believe their eyes. This is not a war, this is an exploration of how far men can be degraded. I am deeply curious to see how much further it can be taken; I want to know. I believe that it has barely started. I believe that far worse things than we have seen will be authorized and will be carried out by millions of boys and men like my Tipper and your Firebrace. There is no depth to which they can’t be driven.”

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford (speaker), Jack Firebrace, Michael Weir, Tipper
Page Number: 145
Explanation and Analysis:

“I know you go out on patrol with [the men] and bind up their wounds and so on. But do you love them? Will you give your life for them?”

Stephen felt himself closely scrutinized. He could have said, “Yes, sir,” and closed the conversation; but Gray’s informal hectoring manner, although unsettling, permitted frankness.

“No,” he said. “I suppose not.”

“I thought so,” said Gray, with a small triumphant laugh. “Is that because you value your own life too much? You think it’s worth more than some simple footsoldier’s?”

“Not at all. I’m a simple footsoldier myself, don’t forget. It was you who promoted me. It’s because I don’t value my life enough. I have no sense of the scale of the sacrifices. I don’t know what anything is worth.”

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford (speaker), Captain Gray  (speaker)
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis:

If night would fall, the earth might resume its natural process, and perhaps, in many years’ time, what had happened during daylight could be viewed as an aberration, could be comprehended within the rhythm of a normal life. At the moment it seemed to Stephen to be the other way about: that this was the new reality, the world in which they were now condemned to live, and that the pattern of the seasons, of night and day, was gone.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford
Page Number: 224-5
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Four: France 1917 Quotes

Stephen felt, at the better moments, the love for them that Gray had demanded. Their desperate courage, born from necessity, was nevertheless endearing. The grimmer, harder, more sardonic they became, the more he cared for them. Still he could not quite believe them; he could not comprehend the lengths to which they allowed themselves to be driven. He had been curious to see how far they could be taken, but his interest had slackened when he saw the answer: that there were no boundaries they would not cross, no limits to what they would endure.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford, Captain Gray 
Page Number: 270
Explanation and Analysis:

Stephen felt himself overtaken by a climatic surge of feeling. It frightened him because he thought it would have some physical issue, in spasm or bleeding to death. Then he saw that what he felt was not an assault but a passionate affinity. It was for the rough field running down to the trees and for the path going back into the village, where he could see the tower of the church: these and the forgiving distance of the sky were not separate, but part of one creation, and he too, still by any sane judgement a young man, by the repeated tiny pulsing of his blood, was one with them.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford
Page Number: 348
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Five: England 1978-79 Quotes

I do not know what I have done to live in this existence. I do not know what any of us did to tilt the world into this unnatural orbit. We came here only for a few months. No child or future generation with ever know what this was like. They will never understand. When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them. We will talk and sleep and go about our business like hum beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford (speaker), Elizabeth Benson
Page Number: 403
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Six: France 1918 Quotes

Gray stood up and came around the desk. “Think of the words on that memorial, Wraysford. Think of those stinking towns and foul bloody villages whose names will be turned into some bogus glory by fat-arsed historians who have sat in London. We were there. As our punishment of God knows what, we were there, and our men did in each of those disgusting places. I hate their names. I hate the sound of them and the thought of them, which is why I will not bring myself to remind you. But listen.” He put his face close to Stephen’s. “There are four words they will chisel beneath them at the bottom. Four words that people will look at one day. When they read the other words they will want to vomit. When they read these, they will bow their heads, just a little. ‘Final advance and pursuit.’ Don’t tell me you don’t want to put your name to those words.”

Related Characters: Captain Gray  (speaker), Stephen Wraysford
Page Number: 409
Explanation and Analysis:

Levi looked at this wild-eyed figure, half-demented, his brother’s killer. For no reason he could tell, he found that he had opened his own arms in turn, and the two men fell upon each other’s shoulders, weeping at the bitter strangeness of their human lives.

Related Characters: Stephen Wraysford, Lieutenant Levi
Page Number: 463
Explanation and Analysis: