Though technically unnamed (like all characters in the story), the narrator is the eponymous jealous husband who is reincarnated as a parrot. The story unfolds through his eyes as he lives out his days inside a bird cage in his former wife’s home, reminiscing about what his life was like before he died. Whether man or bird, his existence centers on his love for and jealousy over his former wife.

Though the narrator’s parrot physicality is shown mostly through his behavior—flapping wings, gnawing on toys, a “restlessness back in [his] tail” (104)—a more direct image appears later in the story through self-description: “I am a yellow-nape Amazon, a handsome bird, I think, green with a splash of yellow at the back of my neck” (106). His avian experience derives its most emotionally charged detail, however, through his interactions with his former wife. These interactions begin early in the story when he describes his attraction to her vaguely birdlike features. Her brown eyes resemble his own, and she has a slightly hooked nose. There is then the way she moves her fingertips through his feathers and other ways she touches him.

While his desires are human, the voices of the human and the bird increasingly merge so that when he sees his former wife naked, he feels she is too exposed, “[p]lucked,” and desires to cover her with his own feathers.