Theme Of Jealous Husband Returns In Form Of Parrot

Showing vs. Telling – Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot details, from his perspective, the experience of a man who is reincarnated into a parrot as he deals with his jealousy from his previous life. After being brought home by his former wife, the narrator must address these feelings as he, limited by his form as a parrot, powerlessly watches his wife move on and develop other romantic relationships. Using the contrast of showing and telling, Butler juxtaposes the simplicity of his human life with the ironic complexity of the narrator’s parrot life to demonstrate the character’s increased self-understanding/awareness and maturation as he comes to terms with his jealousy and progresses beyond …show more content…
Although the narrator never outright admits to jealousy as a parrot, many of his feelings that he tells the readers about match his descriptions as a human. For example, he describes a “burning thrashing feeling” when he attacks his toy, a description reminiscent of his “raging” as a human. Furthermore, the few times that his spoken words match his intended meaning are when he attempts to insult the other males. He calls a “pasty” man “Cracker” and says “peanut” when he sees the nude figure of another man, and all of these demonstrate that his jealous feelings are still present despite his death and reincarnation. The other consistency in the narrator’s parrot life is his actually being a parrot. The narrator states that his physical form is a parrot in the second line, when he questions if the “other parrots” are also people “trapped…for living their life in a certain way,” and outright states “I’m a bird.” Furthermore, the narrator demonstrates that he is physically limited by his avian body through his inability to speak beyond simple terms such as “hello” and “pretty bird.” The narrator also shows that his mind has become similar to that of a parrot’s by describing the world in a manner one would expect from a parrot. When detailing his wife’s beauty, he critiques her nose and mentions that it is redeemed by the “faint hook to it,” similar to a bird’s beak, and when he sees his wife’s nude body, he claims that she looks “plucked.” Through this concurrence, it is established as fact that the narrator still carries his jealous feelings, even as his mind has adapted to the perspective of a