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Part 1: Roots
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Overstory, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Humans and Trees
Time
Destruction, Extinction, and Rebirth
Human Nature, Psychology, and Storytelling
Complexity, Branching, and Interdependence
Consciousness, Value, and Meaning
Summary
Analysis
All along the East Coast of the United States, it is “the time of chestnuts.” Jørgen Hoel, a recent Norwegian immigrant to Brooklyn, joins a group who are throwing stones at the trunks of chestnut trees to make the nuts fall. Later, he and his friends roast the chestnuts and enjoy their bounty. That night, Jørgen proposes to an Irish girl named Vi Powys.
The main events of The Overstory begin with a sweeping summary of one family (the Hoels) over the course of more than a century, yet all of it is narrated in the present tense. This immediately disrupts usual notions of narrative time, as what takes place centuries ago or over the course of decades is presented as simultaneously occurring in an ever-expanding present. Beginning in the mid-1800s, the book presents an earlier United States that’s rich with the bounty of chestnut trees.
Themes
Jørgen and Vi get married. Two months later, they become U.S. citizens, and soon they decide to head west, feeling a “hunger for the uncut world.” They move to the new state of Iowa and start farming. Their lives are hard, and the winter is harsh, but they keep working. Vi gets pregnant in the spring. In May, Jørgen finds six chestnuts in his pocket from the day he proposed, and he plants them. The narrator notes that they are hundreds of miles west of the tree’s native range.
The book’s omniscient narrator frequently switches between describing the characters and commenting on facts (usually about nature) beyond their immediate perspective. The human characters are not always the center of attention, as the book seeks to make nature itself a character. The Hoels’ move west is an example of the nearly universal human desire to grow and expand, and particularly to settle in places that are “uncut” or undeveloped by others.
Themes
The Hoels’ first child dies as a baby, but Jørgen and Vi go on to have many more children. Years pass, and Jørgen keeps fighting to keep his farm and his chestnut seedlings alive. One fails to sprout, one is killed in the winter of 1862, and one is accidentally killed by the oldest son John, who strips off its leaves to use as play money. Jørgen beats the boy when he finds out what he did. There is a draft in 1863, but Jørgen is deferred, as he has “a smaller country to save.”
The war mentioned here is the American Civil War. (The “smaller country to save” likely refers to the American frontier, or the Western territories that were neither Union nor Confederate states.) The book follows two parallel storylines to highlight how time moves differently for humans and trees: new generations of Hoels appear as the chestnut trees are still experiencing their own version of childhood. It is also telling that John kills the tree to use its leaves as play money—highlighting that our real (paper) money also comes from trees, and that so often forests are destroyed entirely in the name of profit.
Themes
Meanwhile in Brooklyn, a “poet-nurse to the Union” is writing about “A leaf of grass,” though the narrator notes that Jørgen will never read his words. On the Hoel farm, the three surviving chestnut trees keep growing, and Jørgen dreams of their future bounty of chestnuts. But one tree dies that year.
The “poet-nurse” is Walt Whitman, the author of the poetry collection Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s collection connects to The Overstory in that both books honor nature and explore humanity’s interconnectedness with everything else in the universe. Again, the narrator highlights the narrow view of each individual character by pointing out the larger web of connections that they cannot see.
Themes
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More years pass, and lightning strikes one of the chestnut trees, which burns to the ground. The last chestnut keeps growing and flowering, though now it has no mate for hundreds of miles. Despite this, the tree continues on with its “ancient formula: Keep still. Wait.”
The chestnut tree does not move or think like humans do, but it does move, grow, and think in its own way.
Themes
Decades pass, and many of the Hoel children marry and move away from home. John remains to work the farm, buying a new tractor and becoming enthralled with “speed, progress, and machines.” In 1901, Jørgen lies dying in his bedroom, looking out the window at the last chestnut tree as his granddaughter attends to him. He dies soon after, and John Hoel buries him beneath the chestnut.
The human world progresses rapidly, with an emphasis on “speed, progress, and machines,” as the chestnut tree remains the same. By now, this specific tree is inextricably bound to the history of the Hoel family in Iowa. It even becomes Jørgen’s final resting place, outliving him and remaining a constant presence even as dramatic shifts take place in the Hoels’ lives. In this context, the chestnut tree represents the idea that trees are witnesses to history in their own right, and that they experience time in a vastly different way than people do.
Themes
The chestnut tree becomes a “sentinel tree,” a landmark that others use to navigate in the prairie. John Hoel keeps buying new machines, and he soon purchases a Kodak No. 2 Brownie camera. He photographs many things, including the chestnut. One day John remembers the “zoopraxiscope” he bought for one of his daughters, and he comes up with an idea: to take a photo of the chestnut tree from the same spot for every month for the rest of his life. No matter the weather or his wife’s teasing, he stays true to his goal for a full year.
A zoopraxiscope was a device for showing moving pictures through a quick succession of still images. John Hoel thus hopes to achieve a similar effect through a flipbook of photographs of the chestnut tree. This project of photographing the tree every month will last for decades, and it shows a concrete connection between the experience of time for a tree and for a human family. Presumably, it will show how the chestnut tree remains a stoic and unchanging landmark for the family and for passersby, while human history continues to move at a much faster pace. As such, the photographs could inspire viewers to think about the passage of time from the tree’s perspective rather than their own.
Themes
Meanwhile, on the East Coast, a fungus that kills chestnut trees arrives via the shipment of trees from Asia. Soon, the blight has spread across state lines, killing hundreds of thousands of trees. No matter what people try, the chestnut plague quickly stretches the entire coast.
Human meddling in the usual processes of nature causes the introduction of the devastating chestnut blight. The narrator again comments on events taking place far beyond the perspective of the book’s individual characters, which speaks to the interconnectedness of people with one another and with their environment.
Themes
Back in Iowa, the Hoels haven’t heard of the chestnut disaster. John continues photographing his chestnut tree every month until his sudden death at age 56. His two sons take over the farm, and the younger one, Frank, decides to continue the photography ritual. When Frank is called off to fight in World War I, he entrusts his nine-year-old son Frank Jr. to continue the practice. Frank Sr. dies overseas. Meanwhile, the chestnut blight continues to spread. By 1940, four billion trees have been killed.
The chestnut tree continues its slow process of growth even as humanity causes worldwide destruction—in both the form of the chestnut blight and World War I. Meanwhile, the chestnut tree outlives another member of the Hoel family, again emphasizing the vast difference between how humans and trees experience time.
Themes
Decades pass, and Frank Jr. continues the ritual of photographing the chestnut tree every month. Frank suffers from a lack of imagination, and he never thinks deeply about why he keeps doing it—it’s just a “monthly exercise in noticing a thing worth no notice at all.” Soon, the Hoel chestnut is recognized as one of the few old trees to escape the blight, and it becomes a curiosity to many.
The Hoel chestnut is only able to survive because it is so many hundreds of miles away from where chestnut trees usually grow. The Overstory often highlights the importance of attention and “noticing” as a way of slowing down and better connecting with nature. Frank Jr., then, is treating the photograph project more like a menial task than a meaningful experience—the tree is “worth no notice at all” to him. Nevertheless, he carries on his father’s commitment to documenting the tree.
Themes
In 1965, the Brownie camera breaks, and Frank Jr. replaces it. Many years pass, and the chestnut tree keeps slowly growing while the Hoel family moves through generations. They experience the Great Depression, weddings, divorces, funerals, addictions, and scandals. “Everything a human being might call the story” happens beyond the frame of the chestnut photos. Eventually, most of the Hoel land (like their neighbors’ farms) is taken over by massive monocrop factories. When Frank Jr. is old and bedridden, his son Eric sets up the camera and shoots the next picture of the chestnut. He shows it to his father, who tells him to “leave that damn thing be.” Despite this, Eric doesn’t stop.
This passage highlights the fact that people’s idea of “the story”—that is, what is meaningful in life—is a limited one. The Overstory instead seeks to present the lives of trees and nature itself as also telling a meaningful and even compelling story. The book does this explicitly here by representing the many dramas of generations of Hoels in just a few words, and by juxtaposing this with the slow growth of the chestnut tree alongside them. Meanwhile, the death of the family farm is another sign of human destruction in the name of immediate profit.
Themes
Eric’s son Nicholas Hoel is now 25 and flipping again through the book of photos of the chestnut tree, watching his entire family history “encoded somehow in that animated tree.” The photo book has always been his favorite family heirloom, and he can never get his fill of it. As Nick flips through the images, he also relives scenes from his own childhood: digging in the dirt with his cousins, stealing the photo book to keep poring over it, starting to sketch branches, surviving high school, going to “juvie” for six months for smoking a joint, and finally realizing that he needed to devote his life to art.
The narrative finally arrives at its first protagonist, Nicholas (or “Nick”) Hoel. The fact that the book takes so long to get here, and instead begins with the origin of the Hoel chestnut tree, again shows the book’s goal of decentering its human characters and challenging usual notions of the passage of time. Through the book of photos, Nick becomes attuned to the relativity of time from an early age, recognizing that his entire family history is also “encoded somehow in that animated tree.”
Themes
Nick remembers first telling his father that he wanted to go to art school. He was very nervous, but his father quickly accepted the situation. Nick then went off to Chicago where his view of the world broadened, but he continued to focus on drawing branches. He once even dreamed of spines growing out of the palms of his hands, and when he awoke, he realized that the image came from the photos of the Hoel chestnut tree.
Nick’s art is inspired by nature and also by other art about nature—namely the family photo book—and his own art will go on to inspire others. Many characters in The Overstory will become obsessed with ideas of endless branching, an image that emphasizes the complexity of the natural world and humanity’s relationship to it.
Themes
Now 25 years old, Nick has graduated, won a prize for sculpture, and he works as a stock boy in a Chicago department store. He is back at the family farm for Christmas, and it is the day before Christmas Eve. Just he and his parents are here, along with his grandmother, who still lives on the farm; but on Christmas Eve, many more Hoels will arrive. That morning of the 23rd, Nick invites the family to go along with him to see an art exhibit in Omaha, but no one takes him up on his offer. It is very cold out, and Eric Hoel has turned on the house’s old propane heater. Nick heads out.
After extensive summary and flashbacks, the narrative now truly arrives at the present action for its first protagonist. Nick is divided from the rest of his family by his love of art, which is what leads him to take the trip to Omaha by himself.
Themes
It snows as Nick drives, and on his way back home from Omaha, the storm worsens. Soon he is having to inch his way along through a wall of falling snow, and after a near miss with a skidding 18-wheeler, he parks the car at a rest stop, shaken. He tries to call his family, but their phone lines are down. Nick sleeps in his car for a few hours and heads home before dawn. When he arrives, he notices that the road is unplowed, which is unusual.
The unplowed road is the first hint that something is wrong. Nick knows that his family members, the descendants of frontier farmers, are usually hard and fastidious workers.
Themes
Nick finally leaves the car and slogs through the snow to the house. He bursts in singing but is greeted by silence. Nick then walks through the house and finds his father, mother, and grandmother all dead, the latter two still curled up in their beds. The propane heater has been leaking toxic gas, all of it sealed inside by the well-insulated house. Nick staggers outside and falls into the snow, passing out. When he revives, he looks up and sees the branches of the chestnut tree.
This horrifying scene is seemingly the end of the Hoel family saga, as only Nick now survives of his immediate family. Once again, this event—which is devastating for the human characters—is juxtaposed with the chestnut tree, which continues in its patient growth and constant branching upwards.
Themes
