The People in the Trees

Throughout The People in the Trees, there is a clear contrast between the communities Norton discovers and the intense inner loneliness that pervades his life. Norton frequently comments that he experiences intense feelings of loneliness as a contrast to his observations of the close-knit communities of the Ivu’ivuans and the dreamers. Not only do his observations intensify his feelings of loneliness, but they also push him to construct an enormous adoptive family later in the novel, with the hopes of filling the hole inside himself. This endeavors fails, however, and despite building a community around him, Norton finds himself just as lonely at the end of his life as he does at the beginning.

The dreamers are all Ivu’ivuans who are exiled from the village for suffering the later-stage effects of Selene Syndrome. Despite their forced isolation, they find each other and create a close-knit supportive group. Even in her state of mental degradation, Eve exhibits a sense of community, for she is able to find contentment with those around her and even in her own company. This idea is something wholly unrecognizable to Norton, who states, “Later, when I was older, I would remember with awe and envy [Eve’s] apparent lack of loneliness, how she seemed to need no one and nothing except food” (153). Norton has never achieved such a level of comfort with either himself or the people who surround him. Throughout the novel, he never stops searching for answers to the mystery of the opa’ivu’eke and to his own loneliness. Even when he believes that he has found an answer to his own issues in the form of his adopted children, he is proven wrong when the loneliness eventually creeps back in, leaving him with a feeling of being incomplete.

During his time with the Ivu’ivuans, Norton finds a temporary cure for his loneliness through his (somewhat questionable) interactions with the children. While on Ivu’ivu, he meets two boys who leave a lasting impact on him; the one from the a’ina’ina, who meets him in the woods at night, and the small boy who naps with him. They spark in him a sense of belonging and a feeling of happiness, and he tries to recreate this feeling with every new adoption of a U’ivuan child, but these feelings always prove to be temporary. He is aware of this pattern and often reflects on the nature of his relationship with his adopted children, stating, “[W]ith each new child I acquired, I would irrationally think, This is the one. This is the one who will make me happy. This is the one who will complete my life. This is the one who will be able to repay me for years of looking” (373). Thus, Norton does not adopt these children to save them; instead, he is desperately trying to save himself from a life without emotional fulfillment. He tries to form a community around him through which he can escape his loneliness, but it is not genuine. He sees adoption as collecting and ultimately uses the children for his own gain, undermining any real sense of community that might have otherwise grown between himself and his children.