Birds And Other Things We Closed In Our Heart Analysis

Words: 2063
Pages: 9

People tend to express their pain and sadness in several ways. Some lash out, some sing, some simply just fall apart. In “Birds and Other Things We Placed in Our Hearts,” the author, Timmy Reed, wrote a story about hardships in relationships and unhappiness. The main character in the story is content in his emptiness, however, his partner is not. The partner tries everything to fill the emptiness inside but nothing works. Slowly and over time, both the main character and the partner fall apart. Reed tells this story and helps the reader understand through the plot by the main points of the story, the themes of lost love and sadness, and through his multiple uses of symbolism throughout the story as a way to tell it with more meaning. The short …show more content…
The narrator feels free when they are released while the secondary character feels empty. This ends up causing problems for their relationship and they both end up falling apart. The author tells this story through the plot when he explains all of the main points such as letting the birds go, the secondary character filling their chest with random items, and the narrator keeping himself in the attic. He also tells this story with the themes. The two themes of this story were lost love and sadness. The sadness of the secondary character was stemmed from the emptiness that they felt and how nothing they did could fill the emptiness. The sadness of the secondary character caused the lost love because not only could the secondary character not fill themselves, but the narrator could not help them either, despite how hard he tried. Finally, the way the author helped the story was through symbolism. Almost everything in the story is a symbol for something else. Letting the birds go as a symbol of being free for the narrator and letting go of anything that helped them feel even a little bit whole. Everything the secondary character put in their chest was a symbol for trying to feel whole again. Lastly, the attic was a symbol for the narrator, empty on the inside, full on the