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).