Acorns Symbol Analysis

Acorns feature throughout the book as a symbol of new life, hope, and possibility. When Lauren is living with her family in the neighborhood, they regularly eat acorn bread. It is only later that Lauren’s father explains that they make and consume acorn bread because he read in a book that Native Americans used acorns in this manner. This demonstrates Lauren’s father’s belief in innovatively creating (or recreating) new ways of living, a principle he passed onto his daughter. Acorns are also important at the very end of the novel, when the group of people who settle on Bankole’s property decide to ritualistically plant oak trees using acorns as part of their mass funeral. Again, this emphasizes the extent to which acorns symbolize the rebirth that is inherent within the natural world. Acorns fall from grown trees and are planted in soil, feeding on the nutrients provided by dead plants in order to grow into new trees. Fittingly, the new community decide to call their home “Acorn” as a tribute to this sense of new life in the midst of death and destruction. This also links the community’s home base to the religious principles around which they have congregated: Earthseed. Acorns are, after all, a type of seed, and the Biblical Parable of the Sower after which the book is named—and which is included in full at the very end of the narrative—focuses on the importance of planting seeds in “good ground” in order for those seeds to grow and flourish. Despite the apocalyptic landscape in which the characters live, they can plant acorns both metaphorically and literally in the “good ground” of their community and thereby find hope in a new, better way of life.