Jealous Husband Returns Parrot

Words: 1241
Pages: 5
Open Document
In everyone’s life there lies a monster that hides deep within us. It’s a monster you can't ever get rid of and isn’t something you can control but it manifests within you and causes you to think irrationally. This monster is jealousy, something everyone once in their life whether it be your brother got a toy and you didn’t or somebody bought that last copy of a game you wanted. It’s one of the worst traits of man kind forcing us to resent someone for something they don’t even know they did; Jealousy can get you into a sticky situation that could have been easily avoided. This trait is very apparent throughout the story “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” by Robert Olen Butler. Butler throughout the story present many major traits of …show more content…
In the story it starts with a young married couple and it begins to focus on the husband. He is a jealous and cowardly person who suspects that his wife is cheating on him so he chooses, instead of confronting her, to go and spy on the guy she has mentioned from work. His jealousy pushes him to do something he never thought he’d do which is climbing a huge tree to see into a window of a man that his wife had mentioned. As the husband said “I'd found the address of the new guy at my wife's office. He'd been there a month in the shipping department and three times she'd mentioned him. She didn't even have to work with him and three times I heard about him, just dropped into the conversation” (Butler 221). These small events forced him to go spy on the new guy and ultimately caused him to fall out of the tree and end up dying. He made rash decisions because of his built up insecurities began to show from all the times he got worked up over his wife mentioning another mans name from work casually. He would constantly compare himself to other men and talk about how he felt inadequate and how he didn’t compare in his eyes. One of the big downfalls of the man was his lack of assertion throughout the story. With the jealousy consuming him and forcing him to do things he normally would he still never got the courage to talk to his wife and be assertive about the …show more content…
This is very apparent when they first show us the man in the form of a parrot in his cage at the pet store. His wife walks in with another man and looks at him talking and laughing but he isn’t able to say anything to her except a few words that mean nothing when said separately. He repeatedly tells us about how he never confronted his wife and instead turned away and ignored what was happening “It never did any good in the other life either, the thrashing around I did by myself. In that other life I'd have given anything to be standing in this den with her doing this thing with some other guy just down the hall and all I had to do was walk down there and turn the corner and she couldn't deny it any more” (Butler 222). He had lost his chance to express his emotions and tell her how he felt so instead he was forced to not be able to talk and had to watch as she moved on from him. It showed a direct correlation from when he didn’t express himself as a human and chose to be jealous and go indirect routes and now after his death he is stuck only being able to take the indirect route with no other option. He rethinks everything while his wife looked at him in his cage and thought about how if he hadn’t been such a coward and expressed his jealousy and suspicions he could have changed what had happened but it was to late. He was forced to watch his
Show More

Related Documents: Jealous Husband Returns Parrot

Jealous Husband Returns In Form Of Parrot Analysis

The short story Jealous Husband Returns In Form of Parrot by Robert Olen Butler emphasizes how having a cheating spouse can lead you into living a regretful and jealous afterlife. In the story, the husband dies and returns to life as a parrot, only to see that his wife still has the same ways. The husband’s possessiveness resorts from his wife being unfaithful to him. Therefore, his behavior led him to be emotionally damaged and consider what could have been. An important realization was that the…

Words 381 - Pages 2

Robert Butler's Jealous Husband Returns In Form Of Parrot

The short story Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot by Robert Butler is an interesting lesson on what a bad marriage is. The reader can actually take this story and learn from these characters mistakes. Obviously, the author wrote this story and added some comedic relief in order to shed some light on this serious subject; which helps the reader acknowledge that this isn’t real life. It is not every day that your dead husband returns to you in the form of a parrot and watches as you continue…

Words 1096 - Pages 5

RACE AND MODERNITY IN O CORTIÇO BY ALUÍSIO DE AZEVEDO Essay

Introduction When Aluísio de Azevedo first published O Cortiço in 1890, it was immediately recognized as an important literary event. Still on every mandatory reading list in Brazil today, the novel is traditionally interpreted as a high point in Brazilian naturalism, heavily influenced by French deterministic thinkers and focusing on class conflict. Already in his own time, literary critics emphasized the similarities between O cortiço and Émile Zola’s works,1particularly L’Assomoir (1877). Subsequent…

Words 6615 - Pages 27