The Bear and the Nightingale: Therapist Character Review
The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
See my non-spoiler review here.
Let’s deep-psyche dive into the good stuff of this first novel: The Characters and their psychology. As a therapist, of course, it’s fun for me to pick apart the psyche and analyze it.
The first intriguing character: Vasya’s mother. She chose death, knowing she would die in childbirth so she could have this daughter, somebody worth dying for. Does anyone else want to know more about her royal past and lineage? I was wanting to understand her better, but unfortunately only given just enough to keep me wanting more.
Dunya- the woman who raised the girl. She became a flesh-eating Upyr, and the most tragic and emotional part of this book was her fading consciousness, horrific post-human body, and the horror that her consciousness could still exist within that rotting corpse. Maybe I’m dark and morbid (I did like Dracula and was raised by Anne Rice), but I love the exploration of Vasya’s emotion while watching her almost mother descend into madness as life slipped from her grip. Imagining the tragedy of emotion she must have felt, the pull of wanting to save her, and the stark reality confronting her..that she was dead. As she sucked Vasya’s blood, it must have enlightened some organic memory in Dunya’s brain, but then she relapsed to her beastly self again, showing that the brain sparking memories does not mean there’s consciousness or a soul living in there. I like that it brought up thoughts for me about consciousness, the soul, and what it means to be alive.
The Priest- The most interesting character due to his complexity. He has a self-schema that goes beyond “the pious priest” — he believes himself a savior to the people. At all costs, he thrives and survives on fulfilling this view of himself to feel worthy and virtuous. Although he seeks to please God, he really seeks to please his own God complex and ego. This ego is his vulnerability, as he is unable to accept he is just as a victim to sin as the people he claims to save.
Although at times he seems to briefly recognize his sin, he can’t handle the feelings of failure brought on by his own unrealistic self-image. He refuses to acknowledge that he himself needs a god to forgive him. Since he is his own God, he is presented with a constant conflict in which he doesn’t know how to save himself from his sin. The irony is in his hypocrisy — he constantly preaches repentance, the one thing that he refuses that could alter his fate. He unconsciously manipulates himself because he can’t deal with the anxiety that would result in admitting what he is — a pedophilic monster. His unacceptable impulses are so strong he represses them (do they resurface in a symbolic form?), burying them as soon as they surface in his delusion of himself as a God. He also denies his sexual urges by projecting the hate he has for himself onto Vasya and Anna. He knows that all evil must be atoned for, and the enemy plays on his weakness cleverly by convincing him to sacrifice to death an innocent soul. Since he desperately needs atonement for sins — the sacrifice alleviates his anxiety and he yearns for freedom from his guilt. He is deceived by his own faulty morality and falls prey to the manipulation of the evil one out of hope he will somehow be forgiven by turning over the evil. At first, he truly believes he’s hearing the voice of God, even though the reader is able to clearly see he’s hearing the voice of an evil force. Even after he realizes the evil one is manipulating him, he wants so badly to maintain his self-schema that he is in complete denial — another defensive mechanism used to defend the psyche against unacceptable parts of the self.
What could the priest have done differently to prevent so much angst and conflict? By accepting all the parts of himself — good and bad — and coming to terms with his sinful nature, he would have recognized and prevented his impending doom. This conflict demonstrates that by fighting, repressing, and denying who we are, we not only set ourselves up for unrealistic expectations of ourselves but bring on excess feelings of guilt and shame. When turned against the self, these feelings manifest as physical and mental depression, a form of self-hate. When turned against others, these feelings manifest as hate, anger, and even violence.
Finally, Vasya. A budding teenage girl, she is faced with the moral dilemma of choosing between the safe, expected, and predictable path, and the path she feels called to. Although this is a common fantasy trope, it is unique in that she has a solid sense of self-worth and self-confidence. She’s not concerned too much with her appearance, which was refreshing. Instead, she decides early on that she doesn’t care about boys, marriage, romance, or settling into an easy life despite the poverty she lives in. This was also refreshingly satisfying, as the story didn’t fall into a typical teenage romance which I was dreading.
What I liked most about Vasya is the unapologetic command she takes over her life, refusing to care about the consequences but knowing what she must do for her own happiness. Unlike other teenage tropes, she’s less conflicted about her self-esteem and self-worth. Her only conflict is figuring out what she must do to save her family and maintain her independence. Her selfless character was not overdone; she wasn’t an overly virtuous character, but a genuine person wanting the best for her family. Of all her decisions, the one that shocked me the most was letting Dunya suck her blood after she was transformed into the hideous and horrifying Usyr. This was traumatic and heart-wrenching to read, and delved deep into feelings of unconditional love, the type of love that doesn’t care about consequences or even death. This is an example of the complexity of these characters that completely blew my mind. Another decision that pained me was the choice to leave her little sister in the end — a tough decision, but also a realistic one as often we are faced with these kinds of decisions in life.
At the end of this first novel, Vasya learns to listen to her inner voice, and follow her heart despite the resistance from her family. I am so excited to see how The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch develop. I’ve never been so excited about book two in a trilogy.
