How the death of both the Father and the Bird give us insight into Martyn’s character. (Martyn Pig)

When Martyn first tells the reader about the death of the bird, he enters a ‘flashback’ stage when he is clearly quite a bit younger. Maybe it is because of his youth or maybe it was just because he had been growing up with his fathers’ attitude in the background of his life, but he does not seem to know how to feel about the death of the small creature. The reader knows this because Martyn seems to almost ‘recite’ how he is supposed to feel, by saying; “it left me cold. Ashamed. Scared. Dirty and bad.”

Martyn then goes on to thoroughly describe the birds’ body. “Limp and heartless” with “a pearl of bright red blood on its beak.” This extremely close description of the birds’ body could be considered as somewhat odd and it might also possibly change the reader’s view of Martyn slightly. This description could tie in with the body of his father, and the way he describes it; “A thin red ribbon meandered down from the corner of his mouth and lost itself in the dark stubble of his chin.” These two very descriptive passages let the reader detect that Martyn looks at things, perhaps a little bit too closely and that both instances are perfect examples of Martyn’s emotional detachment from the rest of the world.

Martyn’s reactions to these events are very strange, for example, if any ‘normal’ person was put in the situation where they had just technically killed one of their close relatives and they are then standing in front of them, you would expect them to be in hysterics, trying to contact the emergency services or at least shed a tear, however, Martyn shows none of these reactions and he simply stands there, emotionless. Again, this is similar to his reaction when he finds that he killed the bird. “Gone. Out of sight. It didn’t happen. Forget it.” If I personally was presented with this situation, I would feel extreme guilt at the act that I had just committed, however Martyn simply throws the lifeless body away, “Gone.” This lack of proper reaction can also link together with Martyn’s emotional detachment and general abnormality.

Although Martyn does not display emotions of guilt or sadness in these situations, he does seem to feel something that more represents empowerment. When Martyn kills his dad, rather than calling the emergency services, as he should have done, he went to go and sit in his fathers’ chair. This gives him a sense of power as he had never before been allowed to sit in said chair and doing so made him feel rebellious and somewhat powerful which he could have possibly only felt once before, when he killed the bird. He says; “I felt something not all bad. I don’t know, a sense of power, maybe.” Martyn gained a kind of thrill at the idea of having total control over something else’s life, maybe he found such pleasure in it because he doesn’t have that kind of control over his own life, therefore having total control over SOMETHING would be slightly alien to Martyn as his life is quite monotonous so something new would be welcomed. “Just pulled the trigger and shot it, dead.” The reader can almost distinguish a sense of pride from the way that Martyn is speaking, however he then ‘recites’ how he was supposed to feel.

Upon looking at all these separate bits of evidence, we can see that perhaps because Martyn reads a lot of detective novels and watches similar programmes on the television, the characters’ traits that Martyn watches and reads about could have ‘rubbed off’ on him. This would explain why he looks at the corpses in such detail and how he could have known to collect Dean’s DNA in the envelope for plantation on his fathers’ body, however just because Martyn is interested in detectives, that shouldn’t necessarily mean that he should act like those fictional characters. If we viewed this circumstance in a real life situation, it would be like someone who reads a lot of ‘Harry Potter’ actually believing that they are a witch or wizard, in other words, it’s ridiculous.

When we review Martyn’s behaviour overall, when presented with this kind of situation, I believe that our view, as the reader changes from what it was of Martyn. We could generally sympathise with him, as he had a terrible relationship with his father, no mother and an unrequited infatuation with Alex, however, when it comes into light that he shows hardly any emotion over such a traumatic experience, our views shift and we see him more as a disturbed or abnormal human being.