Significance of the Caged Bird in McTeague

The canary that McTeague so desperately cares for takes the place of his trophy wife that he was looking for when he married Trina. He believed that Trina, along with her five thousand dollars, would provide a sense of security like the security he once experienced during his time in the mines with a canary. To McTeague, the canary signifies security, because as a young boy working in the mines, as long as the bird was singing, there was no deadly gas in the mine. Norris compares the canary to Trina, yet McTeauge admires the caged bird because it does not act up and causes little to no stress on him. Trina, on the other hand, refuses to give McTeague money, or security, forcing him to live in a cage of his own. At the very end of the novel, Norris shows how McTeague has started to embody the same qualities of the canary. In his fight with Marcus in the middle of the desert, the two men fall over the dead mule, and “the little bird cage broke from the saddle with the violence of their fall, and rolled out upon the ground” (Norris, 243). After McTeague has killed Marcus, he realizes that in his last action before death, Marcus has handcuffed the two of them together. McTeague is described as “stupidly looking around him, now at the distant horizon, now at the ground, now at the half-dead canary chittering feebly in its little gilt prison” (243). McTeague, like the canary, is trapped out in the open, with his own world destroyed, left dying in the desert. When the canary’s prison is destroyed, McTeague’s prison becomes are reality.