Do you think it is odd that the speaker in "The Night of the Scorpion" does nothing but stand and watch his mother suffer from the scorpion sting?...

At first it does seem very odd that the speaker does nothing to help his mother when she is suffering so violently, but when we consider the implications of the speaker’s age as well as the nature of the village and the other members of the speaker’s family, it does not seem such a heartless reaction.

We do not know how old the speaker is when the incident occurs, but we can assume he is young, because he does nothing but watch the action unfold.  “They searched for him [the scorpion],” the speaker says, and “They sat around/On the floor with my mother in the center.”  The child watches his “father, sceptic, rationalist,/trying every curse and blessing.”  They refers to the people who come from the village to care for the mother – the adults in the room.  If the child were older, he would most likely be asked to help the adults in searching, and yet, if we assume he is young, we can imagine that he has been told to stand on a chair or something and stay out of the way, for his own safety.  And so, given that the speaker is a young child when the incident occurs, it does not seem at all odd that he does nothing to help his mother – what could he do?  As a child he is helpless, and must be kept safe and out of the way himself.

In addition to this, the villagers in the poem are very religious, and their beliefs make them calm before the suffering of the speaker’s mother.  They “buzzed the name of God a hundred times” to better catch the scorpion, and they explain the incident away with the ideas of reincarnation and karma:

May the sins of your previous birth
be burned away tonight, they said.
May your suffering decrease
the misfortunes of your next birth, they said.
May the sum of all evil
balanced in this unreal world

against the sum of good
become diminished by your pain.
May the poison purify your flesh

of desire, and your spirit of ambition

The village clearly has a religious philosophy that places such human suffering as the mother’s into a larger context of universal good and evil, as well as the balance of these opposites within the individual.  Though the speaker’s father is a skeptic, and tries as best he can to ease his wife’s pain as the rest of the villagers sit and watch the poison run its course, we do not know to what tenets the speaker himself is espoused.  The child – and the mother, for that matter – could be of the same mind as the rest of the villagers, and are content that this pain is part of the way of the world, and must simply be endured for the bettering of the soul.  Or in any case, the speaker could be so young that he hasn’t formulated any opinions on the matter for himself; he could be at an age where he takes everything at face value.  In which case there is no point in intervening; one should not mess with the universal balance of good and evil.

And whatever the reason, no one in the room seems to expect anything more or less of the speaker than his watchful absorption of the scene.  This would lead us to believe that the speaker is fulfilling his role within this society, by merely sitting and watching, which substantiates the assumption that he is quite young – young enough to know to stay out of the way as the adults handle the problem, and young enough to be an accepting conformist to the religious assumptions at the root of the villagers’ inaction.