28 pages • 56 minutes read
Robert Olen ButlerJealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Robert Olen Butler
Butler was born in Granite City, Illinois, in 1945 and studied theater at Northwestern University and playwriting at the University of Iowa. He served in Vietnam as a counterintelligence agent and translator, and he is known for his contributions to the literature of the Vietnam war and its aftermath. He is also well known for his love of experimentation and for such short story collections as A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992), Tabloid Dreams (1996), Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards (2004), and Severance (2006). Each of these collections takes on a different formal challenge—writing in the voices of Vietnamese immigrants to the United States, crafting stories inspired by vintage postcards, and offering 240-word stories in the voices of severed heads.
The collection Tabloid Dreams, which includes “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot,” takes its inspiration from the headlines of now-defunct grocery-store checkout tabloids that were less about celebrity gossip than about outlandish fictitious phenomena. For example, Weekly World News (1979-2007) included such headlines as “Bigfoot Stole My Wife!,” “Chimp’s Head Put on Human Body,” and “Duck Hunters Shoot Angel!” Each story in the collection takes one ridiculous headline and humanizes the premise through a first-person narrator—Butler is known for the wildly different characters whom he brings to life through portrayals of human experiences that transcend era or culture. Many of his characters long to make sense of their lives at the same time as they attempt to connect with others across seemingly unbridgeable divides. Among these figures is the narrator in “Jealous Husband,” a story that showcases Butler’s prevailing themes of disconnection and alienation.
Butler has criticized a didactic approach to fiction, seeing stories instead as places for dreams and exploration: “You have an inchoate sense of what the human condition is all about, and the only way for you to know what it is, much less to communicate it, is to create an [artistic] object” (Butler, Robert Olen. “The Danger of Wanting to be a Writer.” Interview by Lorraine Berry. Talking Writing, 2012). The stories in Tabloid Dreams offer such exploration, using characters in extreme settings—such as a bizarrely reincarnated jealous husband—as the objects through which to explore the human condition. Butler has also described his belief that reading should be deliberate, slow, and focused on feeling, both emotional and sensory. His characters attempt to navigate the world by their senses and their emotional responses, and they are most true to themselves when following their impulses, however irrational those impulses may seem.
Literary Context: Karmic Reincarnation, Fairy Tales, and Myths
While the narrative never avows the reincarnation’s precise cosmic logic or spiritual tradition, the narrator’s second sentence all but confirms that the inspiration draws from concepts of karma: “I look at other parrots and I wonder if it’s the same for them, if somebody is trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way” (103). There are many reincarnation beliefs across cultures, and not all of them include a karmic element. Butler’s story, though, very loosely engages a Hindu reincarnation narrative, which is the schema most popular in the English-speaking world. The idea is that a person’s reincarnation, whether in fortune or bodily form, is influenced by that person’s actions in their previous lives.
Yet “Jealous Husband” is less religious than allegorical. Rather than exploring the expansive and ambiguous moral horizons of the spiritual premise, the story takes the notion of karma and renders a simplified poetic “justice” akin to a fairy-tale transformation or mythic punishment: In fairy tales of transformation, individuals are often transformed into things that, on some level, they already are. For example, in some variants of Beauty and the Beast, the prince treats others appallingly and, as a result, falls under a curse where he becomes physically monstrous with fur, horns, and fangs. Because he is a monster in a moral sense, he becomes one literally. In Butler’s story, the husband is reincarnated as a parrot with a limited vocabulary because, in life, he always said less than he should have.
An example from myth, as told in Ovid’s 8 AD Metamorphoses, is Echo and Narcissus. Echo is cursed, able only to repeat back the phrases spoken to her. She falls in love with Narcissus, who becomes infatuated with her because she gives him exactly what he desires—a reflection of himself. When he finally meets Echo’s true self, he spurns her and is cursed by Nemesis to have an equally unrequited love. Narcissus sees his own reflection in a pool and instantly falls in love; to reach his lover, he drowns himself in the pool. In Ovid’s tale, Narcissus drowns because of his own self-love; in Butler’s story, it is the echoing parrot who dies in the end. In each case, a person who loves badly—either because they are too self-centered (Narcissus) or too fearful (Butler’s narrator)—dies because of their inability to love fully and selflessly. Butler inverts Ovid’s story: The one who echoes dies in Butler’s story, rather than the one who speaks, which portrays a different facet of love. Both times the husband dies, first as a human and then as a parrot, it is because of his unwillingness or inability to express his feelings, not his unwillingness (as with Narcissus) to receive another’s.
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