The fact that he is even alive is a miraculous blessing in and of itself. Doodle’s probable rationale is that the world has given everything he has ever needed or wanted, and that he needs nothing else from it. This contrasts with his older brother, who seeks only to make Doodle better. This is ostensibly for Doodle’s own good, but is truly selfish. At several points in the story, Doodle can be heard crying out “Don’t leave me!” This is his intuition kicking in. He knows that his entire family sought to simply leave him behind, buried in a small, mahogany coffin. Instinctively, he reaches out for comfort, willing those around him to take him into their arms. Doodle’s entire character is centered on this need that arose from his deplorable conditions at birth. When he is told to begin walking, he responds with “Why?” Doodle doesn’t understand his brother’s need to fulfill his pride. However, through the connection of their brotherly bond, Doodle senses that it is important to his brother that he become as normal as possible. In his own, struggling way, Doodle is selflessly working throughout the entire story to please his brother, and nobody else. However, when the ibis lights in the tree, a change comes over Doodle. The ibis, so weak and fragile, so far from its natural environment, dies right in front of him. Doodle is clearly shaken. He is determined to bury the bird himself, because he feels a special connection. He knows what it is like to 
feel weak. At the very end, when his brother leaves him in the rain, the singular, wretched fear that Doodle has carried with him his whole life becomes a wicked reality. He has been left behind to die by the one person he trusted completely, implicitly. The bond that he shared with his brother killed him.
	The narrator’s point of view is as much a part of the story as any character. Told from the standpoint of a much older protagonist looking back on his childhood, the tone of sadness and regret carries through as clear as crystal. Not only the tone, but the wonderfully flowing, eloquent descriptions of the world around him allow the reader to see the world completely through the narrator’s eyes, with no detail left out. As the narrator tells the story, he slips in a few comments that betray a much wiser version of the rash young boy in the story. “There is within me (and with sadness I have watched it in others) a knot of cruelty borne by the stream of love, much as our blood sometimes bears the seed of our destruction…” This quote is a great example of both reflecting and foreshadowing by the narrator. He describes having watched others with the same affliction as himself, indicating that he has moved on from the time where he was unaware of it. 