‘The Birds’ Critical Evaluation
...ng the room as Nat fights the terrorising birds and then the shock when he realises that they were ‘small birds, none of any size’. The reader dreads to think what will happen when the much bigger birds attack. When Nat gets a chance to leave his house he observes the strange behaviour of the birds and he is astonished to see that ‘what he had thought at first to be the white caps of the waves were gulls’. This is the first incident where the birds are first described as an ‘army’. ‘They stretched as far as the eyes could reach, in close formation, line upon line’. Suspense is created here because we realise that something is going to happen but we don’t know what. It is quite frightening how a seemingly unintelligent creature can suddenly be so organised and controlled. It was as though they waited upon some kind of ‘signal’ and ‘As though some decision had yet to be given’. As Nat waits at the top of the hill for his daughter ‘something black rose from behind him, like a smudge at first then widening, becoming deeper, and the smudge became a cloud divided again into five other clouds, spreading north, east, south and west, and they were not clouds at all; they were birds’, This is a good technique for creating suspense; Du Maurier uses a kind of build up, increasing the quantity of the birds. ‘A black-backed gull dived down at him from the sky, missed, swerved in flight, and rose to dive again. In a moment it was joined by others, six, seven, a dozen, black-backed and herring mixed’. Again Du Maurier increases the numbers; this is a good technique because when she does this we, in our heads, keep increasing the numbers after so that it seems that there is a very large quantity. ‘Then he saw a gannet’ ‘The wings folded suddenly to its body, it dropped like a stone’. This is a very tense moment because the gannet may hit him but then again not. ‘This gannet could have split his skull’. ‘He dreamt uneasily, because through his dreams there ran a thread of something forgotten. Some piece of work, neglected, that should have been done’. This thing that hasn’t been done seems quite important which creates tension yet again. We don’t know what it is but we realise it is of great importance. As we read on we discover it is the fire, it had not been lit to stop the birds from entering the house. We instantly come to the conclusion that the birds will be trying to come in, and that is what the burning smell is. ‘There’s something smelling bad too, something burning’. This is tense because the birds are now entering the house ‘squeezing their way down into the kitchen range’. ‘He threw the paraffin onto the fire. The flame roared up the pipe and down upon the fire fell the scorched, blackened bodies of the birds.’ ‘The flames still roared, and the danger of the chimney catching fire was one he had to take.’ This is suspenseful because the house could catch fire forcing Nat and his family out of the house to be attacked by the great army of birds. Nat had forgotten about the ‘Hawks, buzzards, kestrels, falcons’. He had for...