A Bird in the House consists of eight stories of Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka collection that are essentially the same in setting, character, point of view, symbol, image and theme. These facts create much of the concentrated effect that impresses the reader of the book. The stories capitulate each other and resonate among themselves, telling in the end a single, developing tale. A Bird in the House by Margaret Laurence traces the important notion of changing characteristics, symbols and images and consciously forming memories Eby the narrator and protagonist Vanessa MacLeod to help develop her growth to maturity.
Vanessa is ten in the first three stories, and eleven or twelve in many others. In briefer incidents, she is a small child, an older adolescent, or young adult. The characters of the family members do not change, although their situations do, and this serves to dramatize changes within Vanessa herself, who matures within the narrative from a child’s awareness –certain, comforting, self-centred, but also ignorant of other people’s stats of mind and so powerless in action Eto an adult understanding of the confusing, complex and unfair realities that have produced her. This understandi

Vanessa’s account of her last real conversation with her father ends with the words, “But I did not know and so could not tell himE(101). The word know becomes the most important one in Vanessa’s vocabulary. 15 yr old Vanessa is capable only of fantasies and revenge: “I still did not know what to do in reality"

“I felt, as so often in the Brick House that my lungs were in danger of exploding, that the pressure of silence would become too great to be borneE(207) this was said by older Vanessa, herself a mother in the concluding story. When she is 17, she burns the photograph of the French girl from her father’s past, grieving for her father “as thought he had just died nowE107). She realizes the truth about her father’s life, about all that they would have in common and could discuss together if he were still alive, about how much she failed to comprehend when she was a child; herself “desperately anxious to get away from Manawaka and from my grandfather’s house,Eshe has no trouble now understanding his need for “some momentary and unexpected freedomE107). Laurence admitted that A Bird In the House is “loosely based on my family and childhoodE(Margaret Laurence)

Thus the book begins with a clearly defined spatial configuration: Vanessa, within the safety of her house, her family, and her youth, looks out at a world that recedes before her. For her young mind, the essential distinction is between the “insideEand the “outsideE Inside means all that is familiar, supportive, protected by her family. Outside are the rest of reality Eunfamiliar and a world of strangers. Laurence shows us what the child sees, and what she does not see because of her inexperience: “I did not know thenE “I had at the time no idea how much it cost himE(9, 84). One thing she escapes to be with herself is with her love of writing. Even when Vanessa was young, love of writing was another ingenious aspect of her characteristic. She thinks of herself as a writer struggling to understand people. Michael Darling “is trying to order her past, with the understand