Fly Away Peter: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

Jim realizes he’s been living, until now, “in a state of dangerous innocence.” At the same time, though, he did experience violence in his previous life—he just “ had believed it to be extraordinary.” Once, when Jim was fifteen, he saw his younger brother fall into the blades of a grain harvester. When he ran home, he was unable to describe what had happened. Instead, the experience sank down into all that was “unspoken” between him and his family.

Watching his brother die isn’t the only form of violence Jim has witnessed outside of the war. Once, when he was birdwatching, he found a kestrel whose leg somebody forced through the rusty tin of a sardine can. Pitying the bird, he freed it even as it slashed at his hands. Once he got the metal off the bird’s foot, the kestrel was hardly able to do anything but “flop about in the grass.” He reflects on the bird’s flopping about now, wondering how anything can “stand against” all the violence in life. He used to think that “a keen eye for the difference, minute but actual, between two species of wren” might help him “stand against” the horrible things in life, but he no longer believes this.

Feeling the “annihilating” sorrow of life, Jim walks into an area that has been “utterly blasted,” the land made into a “vast rag and bone shop.” Looking for firewood, he finds an old man digging in these desolate woods with a hoe. Jim thinks the man must be digging a grave, but then he sees that the man’s actually planting a garden. For a moment, he is reminded of Miss Harcourt, as something about “the old man’s movements” seems to reflect a “refusal to accept the limiting nature of conditions, that vividly recalled her.” The thought of his friend makes Jim briefly feel better. In the weeks to come, he wonders what the man planted, but he can’t check because “he doesn’t even know where it was, since they never saw a map.” After this experience, Jim takes pleasure in watching birds again.