Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot

“I never can quite say as much as I know.”

This simple opening sentence sets up the two levels of meaning that run throughout the story. It is true physically because the narrator has become a parrot, but it also functions as the central idea of the story—that even as a man, he could never say what he knew, whether it was expressing the depth of his affection for his wife or his fears of her infidelity.

“She knows that to pet a bird you don’t smooth his feathers down, you ruffle them.”

The narrator’s former wife picks him up in the pet store and touches his feathers. This line involves wordplay and hints at who he was as a human, suggesting a complex dynamic between the narrator and his former wife—that some part of him enjoyed feeling jealous, getting his feathers ruffled, and becoming worked up over his wife’s real or imagined infidelities.

“She was still in the same goddam rut.”

As the narrator looks at his former wife and her male companion in the pet store, he thinks back to his jealous examination of their bed, when he would look for signs of other men. The word “rut” has two meanings here. A rut can be an undesirable behavioral pattern—a pattern that, for his former wife, supposedly involves seeking out a certain “kind” of man. At the same time, the word connects to the idea of animals being “in rut,” meaning in a period of sexual activity when males often fight over females.