91 pages • 3 hours read
Richard PowersThe Overstory
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Environmentalism
The novel’s main focus is the environment. The stories of the various characters, while seemingly unrelated at first, are drawn together through a shared relationship with the environment and a desire to avert the rapid deforestation occurring around the world. There are those who choose to act in a direct manner (Nick, Olivia, and the other protestors) and those who choose to act in their own, subtler fashion. Of the latter characters, for example, Neelay tries to replicate his fascination with the environment in a video game, while Dorothy and Ray allow their garden to become overgrown and wild. The actions of each characters reflect a growing belief in the importance of environmentalism and the essential need to act.
The character who best embodies this theme is Patty. For years, she preaches about the vitality and the importance of forests. She is an academic environmentalist whose ideas were too far ahead of her time; scorned and abused by the academic community, she wandered the country only to find validation and huge success in later life. As environmental conditions worsen, her work becomes even more important. She dedicates her life to environmentalism even though she suffers for her beliefs. Her book connects with characters and converts them to the cause. She is the text’s central figure of environmentalism, the preacher around whom the entire theme pivots. Patty’s actions are, in many ways, the idealized form of environmentalism—right up to her death. She makes the ultimate sacrifice for her cause to demand the world’s attention.
The pervasiveness of environmentalism is found in its various outlets. Characters express the theme in many ways. They blow up logging machinery and spend a year camped at the top of a redwood tree; they let their garden grow untamed, the way nature should be; they try to replicate nature’s bounty in a video game. All these methods lead back to the core theme of environmentalism and the importance of stopping the rapid deforestation and decline in the planet’s ecological welfare. The text preaches the importance of environmentalism while providing the reader with many different interpretations of practices that may or may not help the cause.
The Value of Human Sacrifice
If environmentalism is the main theme, then the value of human sacrifice operates in tandem with it. Characters recognize the importance of the message they are preaching and prepare to sacrifice themselves (literally and figuratively) to convey this message as strongly as possible.
Patty is the clearest example of this. When she poisons herself on stage, she becomes a martyr for her cause. At the peak of her social recognition, when she is invited by the world’s most powerful people to teach them about her ideas, she decides that the best way to educate people is to “unsuicide” (423). Patty makes a clear decision on the value of her own life, believing that her sacrifice (and the political message it will send) outweighs anything she can achieve by staying alive. She places great importance on the merits of human sacrifice in the hope that it will achieve her goals.
While Patty makes an active choice, Olivia is accidentally killed in the line of action. During the botched bombing of the logging machinery, Olivia is fatally wounded. Her sacrifice is not made willingly; thus, her death is interpreted in ways that ensure greater value is placed on it than might have been expected. Nick spends the rest of his life seeking the direction that Olivia gave him. He tries to act out her wishes (as he believes them to be) and add value to her premature death. Similarly, Adam, Mimi, and Douggie all remember Olivia’s death and—to some extent—their future actions are colored by how they choose to eulogize her.
Adam does not die, but he does make a sacrifice. He chooses to accept his punishment and jail time rather than give up his fellow activists. In doing so, he abandons his wife and child and gives himself over to a life of incarceration. He makes this decision actively, and Mimi correctly interprets why he has done so: because he still believes in their essential message and hopes that he will be proven to have acted commendably. Ray, likewise, interprets Adam’s sentence as a misjustice. Adam and the others were acting in self-defense, he believes. In reaching this one unrelated person, Adam’s sacrifice has already demonstrated some degree of success.
The Living Forest and the Overstory
The living forest functions as both a metaphor and a theme throughout the text. While many characters walk through forests and experience the interconnected and interdependent lives of the trees firsthand, this notion is expanded and becomes a global theme that touches on the lives of all the characters.
At first, the idea appears in disparate patches. Adam watches ants outside his house; Nick’s family photograph the chestnut tree every month; Mimi’s father meticulously documents every national park they visit; and Neelay is struck by his college’s garden. What appear to be separate, distinct ideas slowly begin to feed into the overarching theme. This becomes the titular overstory, the canopy that exists at the very top of the forest and covers all life below. As the characters come to terms with the reality of the living forest, their narratives become part of the overstory, and the theme is expressed through their lives, actions, and deaths.
This also functions on a structural level. The narrative strands of the story are thematically and structurally separate at the beginning of the books. Appropriately enough, this section of the book is titled “Roots.” The disparate strands and characters are drawn together, meeting one another, being influenced by one another’s work, and living and dying for each other. In a thematic sense, they become narrative embodiments of the living forest, and the overarching narrative becomes the eponymous overstory.
The theme of the overstory is found everywhere throughout the text, from the words and deeds of the characters, to the mise-en-scene, to the descriptive details of the prose, to the actual narrative itself. The function of the theme is to demonstrate the interconnected nature of life itself. The living forest is not just a wooded area, filled with trees—it is everything. It is the backyard of Dorothy and Ray’s house. It is the virtual world created by Neelay. It is the inside of the prison cell where Douggie desperately searches for the memory of a tree. It is the cold area of land where Nick builds his final piece of art. All these words, actions, and deeds—as well as the novel itself—become part of the tissue of the thematic living forest. The overstory is all-encapsulating and affects the characters, the narration, and—ultimately—the readers.
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