Point of View

The novel is narrated in the first person by Red. This narrative style is called “exegetic” because Red is both the narrator and a character in the story. Since Red happens to be a tree, all of the novel’s action is confined to Red’s immediate surroundings. The reader therefore gets a continuous picture, with nothing left out, of the events surrounding Red, but very little view at all of anything in the wider neighborhood. The reliability of first-person narration depends entirely on the personality of the storyteller, and since Red is an old, wise, and optimistic being, the novel’s tone is largely balanced and hopeful. Since Red is not a human, it is also able to make statement about humanity and humanity’s relationship with nature that a human would not authoritatively be able to make.

An important aspect of the novel...