Birdsong

Framing is a literary technique where an author surrounds their primary story with a secondary one. In “Birdsong,” the narrator waits in traffic as a strange woman stares at her from the backseat of a nearby vehicle. This scene serves as a frame for the main story, told in flashback, of the rise and fall of the narrator’s relationship with her lover.

The purpose of this frame is to show how the narrator’s past experiences inform her life in the present. Since the story uses flashbacks to particular events that further elaborate on the narrator’s interior struggle between her desires and her needs, the framing grants readers a point of entry into grasping the story’s main message.

This literary device also functions as a vehicle for the narrator to vent her frustrations. Whether or not the woman in the adjacent car is her lover’s wife ceases to matter when the narrator’s story is focused on the roles society makes people play. The framing only enhances the presence of these roles since the reader, like the narrator herself, is confronted with the stark alternatives to self-acceptance.

Flashbacks serve to add context to a story. These disruptions in the text add meaning to past events in order to make the present more understandable. In the frame structure of “Birdsong,” flashbacks contain the main plot of the narrative whereas the frame focuses on the secondary story.

What this connection between the story’s flashbacks and frame suggests is that the narrator cannot fully separate her private and public lives. In the text, the narrator admits that she keeps her private life to herself (Paragraphs 4, 11). Biographical facts such as her name, birthplace, ethnic group and childhood are undisclosed. What readers do know about her is her relationship with her lover and coworkers. Due to the narrator's conscious veiling of her life aside from her work and romantic relationships, the themes of Gender as Pageantry and Sexism in Everyday Life stand out. Like the women at her job who obsess over marriage, the narrator’s identity is tied to her lover—what he did for her and what he meant to her.

Yet, Adichie seems to subvert the flashback’s purpose by using it as a tool to connect the past to the present without fully granting readers full access to her protagonist’s past. In turn, this subversion works to uphold the power of the narrator’s heavily gendered reality since the reader, by knowing so little about her, can only associate her with the male power (e.g., her memories of her lover) dominating her life.