Summary
The speaker flushes his pet fish down the toilet, and says that this is good. His pet bird begins panicking. Once every two weeks the speaker goes into town to sign up for unemployment benefits, but nobody treats his signature with respect or excitement. With nothing left to kill, the speaker dials a call-in radio show and announces to the host that he is a “superstar,” but the host cuts him off. The speaker picks up a knife and goes outside, where the sidewalk seems to sparkle. He touches someone’s arm, addressing them as “you.”
Analysis
Duffy uses a disarming and unexpected blend of registers and types of diction in these final stanzas. First, her speaker refers to the toilet as a “bog,” a colloquialism used in British English. The crudeness of this word choice contrasts with the subsequent statement “I see that it is good,” which alludes to the biblical creation story. Specifically, this line parallels the speaker with God, who makes the same observation following the creation of the world. By cramming in a far more colloquial and almost vulgar word beside an allusion to a sacred text, Duffy juxtaposes the speaker’s unglamorous existence and horrifying actions with his sense of superiority and grandeur. She also asks us to reflect on the precise nature of the speaker’s violence. He is destroying a world, or at least a life, rather than creating one—but he is unable to discern a meaningful difference, instead seeing destruction as a path to power and glory.
In these last two stanzas, the speaker’s violence begins to ramp up. While he kills a fly early in the poem, the deaths now accelerate, both in terms of frequency and in terms of the types of animals he victimizes. First there is the incident of the goldfish. He then suggests that he will kill his pet bird, or “budgie”: the animal’s panicked reaction also suggests that he has tormented it or caused it pain in the past. The death of the bird, and subsequently the cat, are not described. Instead, readers are able to understand that they have occurred because of the speaker’s statement that “there is nothing left to kill.” Thus even as his victims grow bigger and more intelligent, his way of discussing their deaths grows more euphemistic and avoidant. By the time he exits his apartment to take a human life, this euphemistic tendency has taken the poem to a tonally surreal place. The work’s final lines read more like a description of romance than one of murder. Descriptions of the pavement glittering, in contrast to the “grey boredom” of the poem’s first lines, show us that the speaker is in a suddenly good mood. Even the sidewalks are full of beauty for him. Meanwhile, the almost tender or flirtatious gesture of touching a person’s arm, paired with the abruptness of the second-person address, turns a moment of impending brutality into one of momentary connectedness. These ironic juxtapositions heighten the emotion of these last lines, emphasizing the speaker’s total estrangement from normal social experiences, and the suddenness of the victim’s life being taken away. They also offer a clue about the speaker’s desire for violence. He is disturbed to an extent that hurting others is the only way he knows how to interact with or have an impact on them.
