The idea of life is something that is hard to comprehend. Before great scientific advances discovered that life is made up of cells, it would be difficult to perceive whether the flower you are stepping on or the wood your house is made out of is alive. Once you think about the idea of what it means to live, it becomes simpler, to live is to grow and adapt to one’s environment. Living is perceiving, reacting, and experiencing. In “Joyas Volardores,” Doyle talks about the lives of animals big and small, and how they go about life and what their life is made up of.

Also, that the material that makes animals alive is no different than a human’s. In “Joyas Volardores,” Doyle uses the reader’s emotions and experiences to show that animals and humans perceive the same type of life but only in different ways.

Throughout the text, it feels like Doyle is talking directly to the reader; this makes the writing feel more sincere and honest as if you are having an actual conversation with him. He consistently uses the pronoun “you,” and this makes the reader think more while reading. It makes the reader think of themselves being directly involved in the text. Using “you,” conveys a lot more meaning than saying “humans” or saying something even more generic. “You” is the most relatable pronoun to the reader, and the more relatable, the bigger the impact of the message Doyle is trying to convey. Specifically, in the third paragraph, he talks about how every creature has a limited amount of heartbeats; he says, “you can spend them slowly, like a tortoise […] or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird.” (Doyle) This quote shows that Doyle wants the reader to think about themselves compared to animals, and how animals are just as alive as humans are. 

Doyle’s biggest focus in the entire text is based the idea of all living beings having hearts and needing hearts. Without a heart, any animal would not be alive, yet you can protect it all you want and it can still fail on you. The point he makes at the end of the final paragraph is the strongest, “You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant” (Doyle). This vulnerability is common among all animals, and it something that all animals have to live with. Doyle mostly talks this way about hearts throughout the text. Though, he mixes up his language in the final paragraph changing “heart” from physical to figurative. He opens the final paragraph with, “So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment” (Doyle). This quote is referencing the heart that makes you feel and experience. He is referencing the heart that does not pump blood, but the heart that makes you love and cry. Doyle is using the figurative heart to hold experiences and emotions. The same heart that he is talking about we share with animals, which means the life we are both are experiencing feel the same.

Another element he uses is in the paragraph where he talks about how all life has liquid in motion inside, where he says, “we all churn inside.” (Doyle) This quote best conveys the message he is trying to express. He breaks down each tier of life, from mammals and birds to insects and even cells saying that all have liquid moving, and all of our insides are all the same and all making us churn. Though the churning he is talking about has a double meaning, Churning is commonly referred to feeling; your heart and stomach can churn both figuratively and literally. He uses this concrete example in science to have the reader understand that animals are experiencing life the same as them. They too feel the same emotions as the reader because their material is the same.

In many paragraphs of “Joyas Volardores,” Doyle finishes the paragraph with a very long and descriptive list of various examples. This is very useful in his text; he uses this to draw emotion from the reader. For example, he says, “Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today.” (Doyle) He then spends half of a paragraph listing all the different extinct species of hummingbird. Doyle wants the reader to feel sympathy for the amount of humming birds that died. He wants your heart to feel for the hummingbird, just like you feel sad hearing someone you distantly know died. Doyle even ends the text with a list to leave you feeling something. He talks of you heart can fall in an instant and lists, “the words ‘I have something to tell you,’ a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die” (Doyle). When he says all these sad things, he is trying to get your heart to bite and feel sadness. The point of all this is to try to get the reader to see sympathy first hand and to relate to the animals he is talking about.

At face value, Joyas Volardores looks like a book about hummingbirds, blue whales, and some anatomy. However, once you reach the sixth and final paragraph, the true colors of the text show. The final paragraph shows that the book is talking to the reader and trying to relate to the reader. Doyle talks about the ways the animals spend their lives, and once you start hearing about their death the reader begins to sympathize and relate. The message of Joyas Volardores is that life is experienced the same, whether you are an animal or human you still have life and death and love and hate.