Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot

Robert Olen Butler’s 1995 short story “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” has been widely reprinted and anthologized. Its themes, which typify Butler's work, include alienation, desire, and the challenges of communicating with others. Butler is a best-selling American author and won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his short story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which explores the experiences of Vietnamese immigrants in the United States. “Jealous Husband,” however, involves a fairy-tale-like transformation in which a man dies and comes back as a parrot who is purchased by his former wife. Unable to communicate his feelings to the woman he loves, the avian protagonist ultimately dies again, this time implicitly by suicide. This claustrophobic tale explores humans’ desperation to connect, their terror of doing so, and those emotions’ interplay in the gap between what is thought and what is expressed

This guide refers to the version in the 2007 edition of The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: 50 North American Short Stories Since 1970.

Content Warning: The source material includes a possible death by suicide.

The story opens on a scene in a pet store: The main character, who is also the narrator, is a parrot who was once a man.