Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot

Robert Olen Butler’s 1995 short story “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” has been widely reprinted and anthologized. Its themes, which typify Butler's work, include alienation, desire, and the challenges of communicating with others. Butler is a best-selling American author and won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his short story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which explores the experiences of Vietnamese immigrants in the United States. “Jealous Husband,” however, involves a fairy-tale-like transformation in which a man dies and comes back as a parrot who is purchased by his former wife. Unable to communicate his feelings to the woman he loves, the avian protagonist ultimately dies again, this time implicitly by suicide. This claustrophobic tale explores humans’ desperation to connect, their terror of doing so, and those emotions’ interplay in the gap between what is thought and what is expressed

This guide refers to the version in the 2007 edition of The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: 50 North American Short Stories Since 1970.

Content Warning: The source material includes a possible death by suicide.

The story opens on a scene in a pet store: The main character, who is also the narrator, is a parrot who was once a man. While the narrative never clarifies just how this reincarnation occurred, the story’s first line does clarify how the narrator feels about it: “I can never quite say as much as I know” (103). As a parrot, he lacks human elocution and vocabulary, and this hinders his ability to express himself.

The narrator’s former wife enters the store. The narrator recognizes her but is immediately overtaken with old feelings of jealousy when he sees she has a male companion—a brawny man with ample body hair, exactly the kind of “meat packer” figure whom the narrator always feared his wife desired (the narrator, as a human, was bare-chested). Back when they were married, he would secretly check their bedsheets for other men’s hair, wanting to confirm that his wife hadn’t recently indulged in some illicit dalliance.

The narrator’s former wife purchases him and takes him to his own former home, where she still lives. The story then follows the narrator as he lives out his days as a bird within her household. He is pleased with his “giant cage” and the range of toys that fill it, “the rawhide and the knotted rope,” and the “dangling thing” that he spends his time thrashing (104). He has the desires of both parrot and man; when he thinks of the possibility of his former wife sleeping with other men, he can “bite and bite” (104) at his toys to express his frustration.

He recalls the events shortly before his untimely human death: His wife mentioned a “new guy” in her company’s shipping department, and this stoked the narrator’s customary hair-trigger jealousy. It didn’t help that she remarked on this coworker’s nice car. After hearing that, the narrator had to sequester himself in the bathroom to conceal a spasm of rage (he never wanted his wife to know how insecure and angry he felt). One day, when she went out shopping, the errand struck the narrator as a flimsy alibi for a tryst with her coworker. He uncovered the man’s name and address, went to his house, and climbed a tree in the backyard to spy through the window. Because he couldn’t quite see through the crack in the window shade, he crawled out on a limb to get a better look and fell to his death.

He feels that, as a bird, he is “different now”—yet because he is also not a bird and still has his human thoughts and feelings, he is confused. His bird cage sits where his pool table was when he was alive, and he cannot quite see into his former wife’s bedroom. As she brings home different men at different times and takes them into the bedroom, the narrator’s inability to see inside drives him “crazy.”

He imagines flying away, escaping into the blue sky that “plucks at the feathers” (105) on his chest. Once he tried to fly away but hit his head against an invisible barrier between himself and the outside. His former wife then picked him up and clutched him to her breast, and when he “remembered, eventually, about glass” (106), he realized he was lucky that he hadn’t died. That same day, his former wife wept for him, but she had another man over by that evening.

He knows his former wife is now single and that he cannot make her understand him: “I talk pretty well, but none of my words are adequate” (106). He wonders what he would say to her if he could communicate. Granted, even in his human life, he never expressed his emotions to her. His parrot brain now admits to itself that his jealousy, his chronic fear that she was thinking about other men, was always rooted in something deeper. Throughout their marriage, he was intensely emotionally reliant on her, sometimes feeling as though she was his entire existence. As fragile and dependent as a baby bird, he could not bear the thought of her desiring anyone else. Now he wishes he could express this to her.

Still, despite his dearth of language, the narrator recently found a word that felt right: A mere half hour earlier, his former wife brought home her latest sexual partner, a pale man who spoke in a Georgia accent and wore a “cowboy belt buckle and rattlesnake boots” (106)—and the narrator greeted him with “hello, cracker.” He preened at this feat of wordplay having turned the word for a crispy snack into an insult. Now he looks at the sky, and its blue color reminds him of a blue-front Amazon parrot whom he watched in the pet store. Though he was drawn to that parrot, “it wasn’t long before she nuzzled up to a cockatoo named Gordon and [the narrator] knew she’d break [his] heart” (107). He consoles himself with the few words at his command, calling himself a “pretty bird” just as his former wife did when she bought him.

When his former wife steps naked into the hallway, he finds her “too naked. Plucked” (107); he feels protective of her and wishes he could give her his own feathers. He attempts to communicate using his limited bird vocabulary (“hello,” “pretty bird,” “up,” “poor baby”) but cannot express himself: “‘Hello,’ I say, meaning, You are still connected to me” (107). When the “cracker” joins her naked in the den, the narrator looks at the man’s genitals and offers the descriptor “peanut,” but his former wife seems not to notice. She returns to the bedroom with the man, leaving the narrator’s cage door open, and he realizes that he “can never say what is in [his] heart to her. Never” (108).

He stands on his cage door and considers flying into the bedroom to see what is happening, then turns to look outside at “the sky the color of the brow of a blue-front Amazon” (108). He understands that something stands between himself and freedom, and he determines to fly and throw himself repeatedly against the glass. The story ends as he bids the reader farewell: “Pretty bird. Bad bird. Good night” (108).