The Light Was Still Excellent: cumplicidade sem reparo (C2)
It struck the glass at the hour when the room is brightest and the world outside is, from within, invisible. The sound was domestic rather than dramatic — a knuckle on a door — and then there was a small body on the paving with its wings not quite folded, in the posture of a thing interrupted mid-sentence. What one feels at such a moment is not grief, which would be an overstatement, but a sort of clerical guilt: the sense of having been implicated by an arrangement one did not design. The window is doing exactly what windows are for. It is transparent, and the bird's error was to believe it. Consider what the collision reveals about the two parties. We built a wall out of the appearance of absence, and then asked the world to notice a distinction it has no equipment to make. Every account we give of the bird — that it was foolish, that it was unlucky, that it was fast — locates the fault in the creature, because the alternative account has no comfortable ending. I put it under the hedge, which helped nobody, and went back inside to the desk by the window, where the light was still excellent.
Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).
A ironia do período final decorre de
- A) o narrador confessar que a luz do escritório sempre lhe pareceu insuficiente, o que torna gratuito o sacrifício involuntário do animal.
- B) a comparação entre o corpo do pássaro e uma frase interrompida transformar o episódio numa alegoria explícita sobre os limites da linguagem.
- C) o gesto de colocar o pássaro sob a cerca viva revelar a esperança do narrador de que o animal ainda pudesse recobrar-se do impacto.
- D) o narrador retornar exatamente à janela cuja luminosidade produziu o acidente, evidenciando que seu desconforto moral não altera em nada a estrutura que o causou.
- E) a ausência de qualquer emoção diante da morte demonstrar que o narrador considera irrelevantes as consequências dos hábitos domésticos.