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In times of trouble, Perry Smith is often visited by visions of a golden parrot that swoops down and avenges him. Perry doesn’t consider himself to be a religious man, but he nonetheless ascribes a kind of divine power to the golden parrot. Toward the end of the book, while he’s in a hunger-induced delirium, Perry mutters to himself that the parrot is Jesus. Whatever the parrot is, it is a powerful symbol of Christianity, vengeance, and the divine, and it recurs throughout the story.
The Golden Parrot Quotes in In Cold Blood
The In Cold Blood quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Golden Parrot. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 2
Quotes
It was after one of these beatings, one [Perry] could never forget…that the parrot appeared, arrived while he slept, a bird “taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower,” a warrior-angel who blinded the nuns with its beak, fed upon their eyes, slaughtered them as they “pleaded for mercy,” then so gently lifted him, enfolded him, winged him away to “paradise.”
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The Golden Parrot Symbol Timeline in In Cold Blood
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Golden Parrot appears in In Cold Blood. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 2: Persons Unknown
...Dick about the dream’s end, in which he is saved from the snake by a golden parrot “taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower,” and then is allowed to ascend to Paradise....
(full context)
...lands a gigantic sailfish, an act that makes him feel “as though at last…a tall yellow bird had hauled him to heaven.”
(full context)
Part 4: The Corner
...light bulb. “The walls of the cell fell away, the sky came down, I saw the big yellow bird .”
(full context)
...a voice that asks him, “Where is Jesus?” (“And once he woke up shouting, ‘ The bird is Jesus!’”) He has a recurrent dream of performing in a nightclub to an audience...
(full context)
