Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 1K views

    Butterflies By: Roger Dean Kiser

    Uploaded by

    jonah zhou
    The story describes a young boy living in an orphanage. He finds beauty in butterflies that live on the orphanage grounds. One day, he watches as the house parent cruelly pins captured butterflies to a board, killing them. When the house parent steps away, the boy tries to free one butterfly by removing a pin from its wing. When the house parent returns, he punishes the boy by hitting him with the board covered in butterfly pieces. Later, the boy tries to reassemble and bury the butterfly pieces. The story shows how the boy tries to maintain his innocence and appreciation for beauty in the cruel environment of the orphanage.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Butterflies By: Roger Dean Kiser

    Uploaded by

    jonah zhou
    1K views3 pages
    The story describes a young boy living in an orphanage. He finds beauty in butterflies that live on the orphanage grounds. One day, he watches as the house parent cruelly pins captured butterflies to a board, killing them. When the house parent steps away, the boy tries to free one butterfly by removing a pin from its wing. When the house parent returns, he punishes the boy by hitting him with the board covered in butterfly pieces. Later, the boy tries to reassemble and bury the butterfly pieces. The story shows how the boy tries to maintain his innocence and appreciation for beauty in the cruel environment of the orphanage.

    Original Title

    Butterflies_by_Roger_Dean_Kiser

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    The story describes a young boy living in an orphanage. He finds beauty in butterflies that live on the orphanage grounds. One day, he watches as the house parent cruelly pins captured butterflies to a board, killing them. When the house parent steps away, the boy tries to free one butterfly by removing a pin from its wing. When the house parent returns, he punishes the boy by hitting him with the board covered in butterfly pieces. Later, the boy tries to reassemble and bury the butterfly pieces. The story shows how the boy tries to maintain his innocence and appreciation for beauty in the cruel environment of the orphanage.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    1K views3 pages

    Butterflies By: Roger Dean Kiser

    Uploaded by

    jonah zhou
    The story describes a young boy living in an orphanage. He finds beauty in butterflies that live on the orphanage grounds. One day, he watches as the house parent cruelly pins captured butterflies to a board, killing them. When the house parent steps away, the boy tries to free one butterfly by removing a pin from its wing. When the house parent returns, he punishes the boy by hitting him with the board covered in butterfly pieces. Later, the boy tries to reassemble and bury the butterfly pieces. The story shows how the boy tries to maintain his innocence and appreciation for beauty in the cruel environment of the orphanage.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 3

    Butterflies

    By: Roger Dean Kiser

    There was a time in my life when beauty meant something special to me. I guess
    that would have been when I was about six or seven years old, just several weeks
    or maybe a month before the orphanage turned me into an old man.

         I would get up every morning at the orphanage, make my bed just like the little
    soldier that I had become and then I would get into one of the two straight lines
    and march to breakfast with the other twenty or thirty boys who also lived in my
    dormitory.

         After breakfast one Saturday morning I returned to the dormitory and saw the
    house parent chasing the beautiful monarch butterflies who lived by the hundreds
    in the azalea bushes strewn around the orphanage.

         I carefully watched as he caught these beautiful creatures, one after the other,
    and then took them from the net and then stuck straight pins through their head
    and wings, pinning them onto a heavy cardboard sheet.

         How cruel it was to kill something of such beauty. I had walked many times out
    into the bushes, all by myself, just so the butterflies could land on my head, face
    and hands so I could look at them up close.

         When the telephone rang the house parent laid the large cardboard paper
    down on the back cement step and went inside to answer the phone. I walked up
    to the cardboard and looked at the one butterfly who he had just pinned to the
    large paper. It was still moving about so I reached down and touched it on the
    wing causing one of the pins to fall out. It started flying around and around trying
    to get away, but it was still pinned by the one wing with the other straight pin.
    Finally, its wing broke off and the butterfly fell to the ground and just quivered.

         I picked up the torn wing and the butterfly and I spat on its wing and tried to
    get it to stick back on so it could fly away and be free before the house parent
    came back. But it would not stay on him.

    The next thing I knew the house parent came walking back out of the back door
    by the garbage room and started yelling at me. I told him that I did not do
    anything, but he did not believe me. He picked up the cardboard paper and
    started hitting me on the top of the head. There were all kinds of butterfly pieces
    going everywhere. He threw the cardboard down on the ground and told me to
    pick it up and put it in the garbage can inside the back room of the dormitory and
    then he left.

         I sat there in the dirt, by that big old tree, for the longest time trying to fit all
    the butterfly pieces back together so I could bury them whole, but it was too hard
    to do. So, I prayed for them and then I put them in an old torn up shoe box and I
    buried them in the bottom of the fort that I had built in the ground, out by the
    large bamboos, near the blackberry bushes.

         Every year when the butterflies would return to the orphanage and try to land
    on me, I would try and shoo them away because they did not know that the
    orphanage was a bad place to live and a very bad place to die.

    Characters
    Narrator/boy/main character/protagonist
    House parent/main character/antagonist
    Butterflies/one that gets caught

    Themes

    Thesis: what has the author observed/noticed/about life/society/humanity?

    The author wants to tell us the cruelty and militaristic life in orphanages, as well as the
    happiness and sadness in his growth.

    Through his short story “Butterflies”, the author portrays how a child innocence can be
    maintained in a cruel world.

    Subtopic
    1. Orphanage—cruel
    2. Butterflies
    3. Burial

    Can child innocence be kept all the way? In the story “Butterflies,” Roger Dean Kiser
    discusses the innocence of a boy living in an orphanage. The boy was punished for
    saving the butterflies so as not to become the sample. However, although he loves the
    beautiful butterflies, he has to shoo them away every year to protect them from
    catching. Kiser maintains how a child's innocence can be maintained in a cruel world.
    He shows this through the life of an orphanage, release of butterflies, and the burial of
    butterflies.

    You might also like