Emperor penguins

Emperor penguins enter the narrative through a film the narrator discovers while deployed in Iraq. They are the subject of an attempted gift to Emily, and her rejection of both the movie and the penguins turns his fascination with them into a measure of the distance between the couple.

The Film and Its Penguins

The narrator buys a pirated DVD about the lives of emperor penguins and what they endure to keep living in Antarctica and reproduce. He finds the birds wonderful and writes to Emily, insisting that she should see the film. His response to them is enthusiastic, but the account presents their lives through a movie rather than describing the penguins independently of it.

A Failed Gesture

When Emily does not watch the film, the narrator first explains her silence by imagining that she cannot do so because she is living in the countryside. He then orders a copy for her through Amazon. Emily replies that the film is stupid and that the penguins are stupid. The bluntness stings: he thinks she could at least have pretended to like something for his sake, as he believes he would have done for her. Instead, he concludes that Emily is a good person and that he is the one who has gone wrong. The penguins thus become the unlikely center of a small exchange in which his hope for shared interest meets her refusal to perform affection.