Previous
Part 1: Roots
Themes
and Colors
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.
Active
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.
Active
Themes
Literary Devices
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.”
Active
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.
Active
Themes
Get the entire The Overstory LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
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.”
Active
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.
Active
Themes
Literary Devices
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.
Active
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.
Active
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.
Active
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.
Active
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.
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.
Active
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.
Active
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.
Active
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.
Active
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.
Active
Themes
