Language

The language of “Tea with the Birds” by Joanne Harris is simple and easy to follow. The choice of words is connected to housing, food, and birds: semantic fields connected to the background of the characters and used to convey ideas related to the story’s themes and motifs —the outsider, confinement, and socialisation. The story is conveyed in the narrative mode with very few instances of dialogue, as it follows the subjective perspective of the female narrator.

Imagery and synaesthesia

In the story, there are also multiple descriptive passages which create imagery in relation to setting and action:

Carrots, peppers, radishes, celeriac, parsnips and glossy yellow, purple and black squash gleamed exotically from crisp tissue-paper shells. Then came the thumping of boxes against the walls, raised voices in the stairwell, shouted instructions, laboured steps on the landing, a final double-thump as the crates hit the floorboards… (ll. 72-75)

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Similes

The similes used by the author create interesting associations and help readers grasp the narrator’s perspective. The houses on the street where the narrator lives are “like a row of wedding cakes left out in the rain” (l. 7), a simile that suggests they were once nice but are now unappealing. The narrator also mentions that “people in them live like birds in cages” (l. 8), a simile which helps convey her feelings of isolation and confinement, and her sense that everyone else on the street is also isolated.

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Symbols

The story includes symbolical elements that further convey feelings of isolation, confinement, and loneliness. 

The narrator constantly compares people with caged birds, a symbolic comparison which suggests that she feels like an outsider confined to isolation by society.

The bird-shaped vegetables that she sees in Mr Tamaoki’s fridge reinforce the same idea.

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