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
Olivia Vandergriff wades through the snow, leaving her college campus and heading to her boardinghouse. She only has one semester left of her senior year, and she can’t wait to be done. Olivia is studying Actuarial Science, or the practice of finding “the cash value of death.” She has taken her preliminary exam three times, however, and failed all of them, partly because of her current lifestyle of drug use and partying. The narrator comments on the unique tree in front of her house, but Olivia has never even noticed it. Olivia enters the dark house and accidentally cuts her ankle on one of the many bicycles piled up in the front hall. She curses and hears her housemates laughing upstairs. She goes up and tells them that she finally got divorced today.
The Overstory introduces Olivia as a rather stereotypical, privileged college student: she acts rashly and irresponsibly, is always impatient to move on to the next thing, and pays little attention to the natural world around her. Even her major, Actuarial Science, is described in the most cynical of terms as an example of how humans can commodify and monetize anything, even life and death. She is a thoroughly contemporary human being, but one who is about to have her entire life turned upside down.
Themes
Olivia met her now ex-husband Davy two years previously. They started out lying to each other about their parents and their lives back home, and their relationship was mostly based on sex and getting high together. Now Olivia feels the need to commemorate her divorce by smoking weed and listening to her favorite trance music alone in her room. Olivia was innocent and naïve when she first arrived at college, but now she only plans to be a “semi-bad girl” for a few months, until her real life begins after graduation.
The narrator continues to describe Olivia as quite immature and reckless, undergoing a transformation that’s not unusual for people who have left home and gone to college for the first time. Unlike many of her peers, however, she takes her rebellion quite far, even getting married in the process.
Themes
Now very high, Olivia listens to her trance music and then pauses to write down her own musical ideas. Tonight feels like the best internal soundtrack that she’s ever come up with. Suddenly, she feels the need for a hot shower. Turning on the water, she is momentarily terrified by the sight of blood in the shower and screams aloud, but then she remembers her cut ankle. As she cleans the wound, a housemate checks on her, but Olivia tells them to leave her alone. When her shower is finished, Olivia lies naked on her bed, still wet and very high. She reaches her damp hand to turn off the lamp by her bed and is suddenly electrocuted. Her hand closes around the socket involuntarily, all the lights in the house dim, and Olivia’s heart stops.
Olivia feels little connection to others outside of the temporary highs of drugs, sex, and partying, which is why even her marriage was so superficial and short-lived. She is still learning to inhabit her body as an adult, and she relishes all the experiences that are available to her. However, her downward spiral into reckless pleasure-seeking is suddenly interrupted by an electrical surge, as she dies alone in her bed. This abrupt end marks the close of Part 1 of The Overstory, while Olivia’s rebirth will begin the process of bringing all these separate characters together.
Themes
