Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot

The story’s central transformation—the husband’s death and reincarnation as an inarticulate parrot—offers a commentary on how jealousy and fear lead to miscommunication and the breakdown of human connections. The narrator’s central traits are his jealousy and his incommunicativeness. The jealousy is evident from the title of the story onward, and from the first line, the narrator’s words are inadequate: ”I can never quite say as much as I know” (103). He likewise felt inarticulate and unvoiced throughout his previous life, but the experience is made literal through his incarnation as a parrot. In his life as a man, he loved his wife deeply but, always fearing her infidelity, was jealous of what he perceived as her adulterous desires. He was also always afraid to express his feelings to her, both the depth of his love and the depth of his jealousy and fear, because he found the emotional vulnerability unbearable.

When the narrator was a man, his jealousy took the form of obsession over his wife’s potential paramours; he regularly checked the bed for other men’s hairs, and whenever his wife so much as mentioned another man, he took it as a sign of an imminent or ongoing affair. In his reincarnated form, he is equally powerless, and his jealousy, with no other outlet, manifests as a desire to attack or belittle his former wife’s lovers; he wishes to attack the “meat packer” and bite off the tip of his finger, while he refers to another man as a “cracker” and to his penis as a “peanut” (and feels proud of himself for having done so). As both species, he can neither appropriately express his jealousy nor use his words to connect meaningfully with the woman he loves. To “parrot” something is to repeat it back mechanically, and there is irony in the narrator’s relationship with his former wife: Though she sees him as parroting her speech, he is desperately trying to communicate with her, hoping that his “hellos” and “pretty birds” and “crackers” and “peanuts” will somehow come together in a way that makes sense to her.

Throughout the story, the narrator is a trapped animal, and the entrapment is both literal and figurative. Even when he can leave his cage and fly around within his former wife’s home, he cannot fly outside or reach the sky that he desires—the “blue sky that plucks at the feathers on [his] chest” (105). The sky represents a freedom that is ultimately unattainable, however much he may long for it. The narrator is also caged metaphorically within his dependence on his former wife. He describes the psychic cage of irrational jealousy and fear:

It’s like those times when she would tell me she loved me and I actually believed her and maybe it was true and we clung to each other in bed and at times like that it was different. […] Except even in that moment, holding her sweetly, there was this other creature inside me who knew a lot more about it and couldn’t quite put the evidence together to speak (105).

Beyond being trapped in cages, both literal and metaphorical, the narrator can never quite see enough to understand exactly what is happening. This obscured vision, again, is both literal and metaphorical, both before his human death and after. The literal sense appears in how, as a human, he climbed a tree but failed to spy on his wife’s supposed lover; and how, as a parrot, he cannot see into his former wife’s bedroom. The motif highlights the narrator’s inability to “see” his wife’s reality: Despite her expressions of love, he never registered the truth of those communications. There are then the instances where he cannot see the windowpane, whose invisibility has grave consequences. Likewise, the narrator’s inability to “see” emotional realities is his downfall—and, like the glass, it keeps him from freedom.

As the motif expands, the irony deepens. The narrator is preoccupied with how he cannot see into his wife or know her thoughts, yet throughout their marriage, he was unsatisfied when she did reveal herself through her words and verbal expressions of love. Additionally, though he longs for a better language, he always dismissed such language when it came from the woman whose inner world he so desperately wanted to access. He recalls the agony of trying to decipher “the tracking of her mind behind her blank eyes” (106), yet the full narrative suggests she was opaque to him only because he refused to believe her transparency. By creating a narrator who is trapped and unable to see fully or far enough, Butler has written a modern myth exploring the ways in which humans can find themselves cut off from others, from their desires, and from the possibility of freedom.