Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot by Robert Olen Butler
"Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot" by Robert Olen Butler explores themes of jealousy, transformation, and unfulfilled desires through the lens of an unusual reincarnation. The story features a jealous husband who becomes a yellow-nape Amazon parrot after his death, the result of an accident linked to his obsessive suspicion of his wife's infidelity. As he observes his former wife and her new partner from within a pet store and later their home, he grapples with his lingering feelings of jealousy, which he can only express through frustration at the confines of his cage. The narrative delves into his past, revealing a cycle of suspicion that ultimately leads to his tragic demise.
As the parrot, he gradually becomes more birdlike, contemplating freedom and transformation while still tethered to his past emotions. The parrot's journey highlights the struggle between longing for liberation and the constraints of one's circumstances. The story poignantly raises questions about the nature of love, jealousy, and empathy, suggesting that even in a different form, unresolved feelings can lead to self-destructive behaviors. Through his evolution, the protagonist ultimately finds a bittersweet resolution, suggesting that freedom may come with its own set of challenges.
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Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot by Robert Olen Butler
First published: 1995
Type of plot: Fantasy
Time of work: The late twentieth century
Locale: Houston, Texas
Principal Characters:
The narrator , a jealous man who has been reincarnated as a parrotHis former wife , now his ownerHer lover , a man who wears cowboy boots
The Story
The story revolves around a compulsively jealous husband, the unnamed first-person narrator of the story. It opens abruptly, with the narrator sitting on a perch in his cage in a pet store in Houston, having been reincarnated somehow as a yellow-nape Amazon parrot. One day, his former wife, accompanied by what he assumes must be her current lover, enters the store and is drawn to him. She buys him and takes him back to their former home, where she keeps him in a cage in the den. Despite his physical and, to a degree, psychological transformation, he is still jealous of his former wife's latest lover. He is limited, however, to taking out his resentment on the bird toys in his cage.
In a flashback, the narrator reviews the circumstances that led to his death as a human. His wife had always had lovers, and after becoming suspicious that a new employee at her office had become the latest in that series, he found out where the man lived and went to his house. The narrator climbed a tree in an attempt to look through a window to catch his wife and the man together but died after falling from his perch. No explanation is offered as to the mechanism of his reincarnation.
Over time he becomes more and more birdlike, distancing himself from his jealousy as his thoughts increasingly turn to flying away and escaping. One day his wife leaves the door to his cage open, and he tries to fly to freedom. The sliding glass doors through which he sees the sky, trees, and other birds outside are closed, however, and he flies headfirst into them. When he eventually sees his wife and her new lover naked, he finds them more pitiful than beautiful or threatening, and his jealousy appears to have given way to sympathy. Already injured by flying into the doors that lead outside, he resolves to continue to throw himself against the glass. The story ends with the implication that his response to this new existence, though motivated by a desire for freedom rather than revenge, will have the same fatal result as his response to his former situation.
Bibliography
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Broyard, Anatole. Review of The Alleys of Eden, by Robert Olen Butler. The New York Times, November 11, 1981, 29.
Lohafer, Susan. "Real-World Characters in Fictional Story Worlds: Robert Olen Butler's 'JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction.'" In The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis, edited by Per Winther et al. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.
Myers, Thomas. Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Packer, George. "From the Mekong to the Bayous." The New York Times Book Review 97 (June 7, 1992): 24.
Ryan, Maureen. "Robert Olen Butler's Vietnam Veterans: Strangers in an Alien Home." The Midwest Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1997): 274-294.
Sartisky, Michael. "A Pulitzer Profile: Louisiana's Robert Olen Butler." Cultural Vistas: Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities 4 (Fall, 1993): 10-21.
Womack, Kenneth. "Reading the Titanic: Contemporary Literary Representations of the Ship of Dreams." Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 5, no. 1 (2003): 34-44.