Analysis Of Jealous Husband Returns In Form Of Parrot

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Robert Olen Butler is an author born in Granite City, Illinois who won a Pulitzer Prize. In writing this short story, “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot”, Robert Olen Butler writes about a character whose life revolves around his wife and is a compulsively jealous husband. In this story, the main character was a very jealous husband who dies because of the way he decided to deal with his wife’s cheating ways by climbing a tree and falling to his death, only to come back in life as a parrot and still have very strong feeling for his wife. The jealousy and suspicion that took over his human life has now taken over to his life as a parrot. The tone of the story is frustration and jealousy at which you can tell the tone from the very start when the parrot becomes very observant and jealous of the guy at his wife's shoulder. His feathers became slick flat when the man came around.
Butler short story started off with the narrator sitting on a perch in his cage in a pet shop in Houston, The narrator died and was reincarnated as a yellow-nape Amazon parrot. His wife all of sudden come into the pet shop and is instantly drawn to the parrot. The husband was excited to see her and hoped she would take him home but his excitement suddenly turn into anger and jealously when a man he described as “A guy that looked like a meat packer big in the chest and thick with hair, the kind of guy that I always sensed her eyes moving to when I was alive.” (Burtler, 1995, pg.187).
The narrator was once married before his sudden death he was so jealous that he suspected his wife of constantly cheating on him. He started to suspect a new lover when his wife started to mention a new guy on the job and she mentioned him on multiple occasion so that’s ...

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...window and kill himself because just like his human life he loved his wife so much he could bare seeing another man with her. This act was the only way he knew out and knew he was flying to his death because he stated “And I spread my wings. I will fly now. Even though I know there is something between me and that place where I can be free of all these feelings, I will fly. I will throw myself again and again there. Pretty bird. Bad bird. Good night” (Butler, 1995, pg 191).

With this story, Robert Olen Butler describes, this story as man who failed to stand up for himself and challenge his fears but he choose to take the coward way out. His life was so consumed with jealousy that it consumed his life and that was the only thing he can think of. In the end, the parrot decides he still cannot live with the other men in his wife's life which lead to his final demise.

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