Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1996

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Themes

The Challenge of Communicating with Others

The broad theme of the story, from first sentence to last, is the challenge of communication, specifically as it involves saying what one means. The opening line—“I never can quite say as much as I know” (103)—sets the tone, but it is soon clear that this problem has plagued the narrator since long before his reincarnation.

The narrator struggles tremendously with expressing himself. His most obvious obstacle is that he is a parrot with a limited vocabulary. For example, in the pet store, he can’t find words to engage his former wife: “A ‘hello’ wouldn’t do and I’d recently learned ‘good night’ but it was the wrong suggestion altogether, so I said nothing” (104). His speech is restricted to the simplest of expressions, and it, therefore, feels like a heroic achievement when he communicates an actual thought, as he does when he says “hello, cracker” or “peanut”; yet even in these instances, his audience seems not to fully understand him. Moreover, these utterances convey only rudimentary ideas, and his full thoughts remain locked in his mind like a bird in a cage: “‘Hello,’ I say again. Please listen to this tiny heart that beats fast at all times for you” (107). Only the reader and the narrator are aware of his feelings.

As a human, the narrator also struggled to communicate his feelings, but for more complex reasons. For one, he feared that his wife “could come to start hating [him] real easy” (105), but he also desired to adopt the strong-and-silent machismo that he believed his wife found attractive. Further, he felt as though he was more needy and dependent than she was, and he hoped to hide this weakness through his silence. Just as the narrator’s human inability to communicate led him to despair and to his fatal spying attempt, his parrot inability to articulate his feelings leads him to choose death over continued existence.

The Tangled Relationship Between Love, Fear, and Freedom

The tangled relationship between love, fear, and freedom is another theme in “Jealous Husband.” The story offers no simple or clear solution for that entanglement, instead depicting the experiences as inextricably intertwined and continually interfering with one another.

The narrator’s reminiscences of his human life show how his fears—of being misunderstood, of not being masculine enough for his wife, or of being rejected or hated for his feelings—cost him the relationship he desired. He was afraid to express his jealousy, and his jealousy was itself the product of fear that his wife desired other men more than she desired him. Here, fear leads to the destruction of the self.

Later, in his parrot form, two desires come into conflict within the narrator’s feathered breast: His love and desire for his former wife, and his desire to escape human entanglements and the “terrible sense of others” that pains him (108). To love his former wife, he would have to do so generously and selflessly, accepting the reality of her connections with other men. He would have to let go of his jealousy—and to do this, he would have to love himself and overcome his belief in his inadequacy. Such love would be liberating, but another kind of freedom awaits him in death (although considering his reincarnation as a parrot after his first death, there is the question of what lies beyond this second death).

He desires both freedom and love, yet there is a fraught relationship between those realities. As a jealous husband, he was confined in the cage of his own mind because he could not (or would not) communicate with his wife. If true freedom in this story were freedom from the limitations of the self, from the confines of one’s own fears, the narrator’s implied suicide might resemble such freedom. The story’s larger thematic architecture, however, suggests that if the narrator had worked to embrace himself while he was alive as a man, he might have overcome his fears of inadequacy and found a truer freedom that was rooted in love of both himself and others.

Alienation and Division From Oneself and Others

Alienation is a personal or interpersonal disconnection, an inability either to connect with oneself or to bridge the gap between the self and others. This story portrays several layers of alienation, one being the narrator’s inability to connect with others due to the challenge of saying what he means. He is jealous of his former wife’s connections with other men, which seem to be purely physical and do not rely on verbal communication. Yet the story suggests that this jealousy is misguided and that if one will not or cannot express oneself, one cannot create meaningful connections. Another layer of alienation is the narrator’s disconnection from himself. Because he is divided, does not understand his own desires, and gives into his own fears, he cannot be whole. The division between parrot body and human mind symbolizes a division of the self. The gap between the two halves of the narrator—the parrot that angrily attacks “strips of rawhide” (104) and the man who can do nothing but look on in frustration, grasping for words from his limited bird brain to express himself—is an enormous one.

The physical barriers within the story all comprise a motif of division and represent the way the narrator is cut off from his own desires, his own hopes, his love, and his “dream of peace” (106). There is the bathroom door behind which he locked himself, the veiled window of the “new guy’s” house, the windows of the former wife’s house, the birdcage, and more. While some of these barriers are not of the narrator’s making, several are, including the metaphorical cage in which he locked up the feelings he was unwilling to share with his wife; he describes “this other creature inside [him]” (105) who could not get out. The story suggests that fear is what leads to alienation and division between ourselves and others, and even within our individual selves.