42 pages • 1 hour read
Forrest CarterThe Education of Little Tree
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Mountain
The mountain that Little Tree lives on with his grandparents becomes home to him. He is comfortable exploring its wilderness, and he learns to trust and respect the plants and animals of the mountain. However, the mountain is not always directly present or mentioned. The only times when the writing acknowledges the mountain are in moments when Little Tree either has an opportunity to learn and grow or has an opportunity to apply earlier lessons to a new situation. At the end of the novel, Little Tree leaves his grandparents’ mountain in search of his own.
This transition shifts the symbolism of the mountain itself, for it comes to represent Little Tree’s character development and need to grow. While he is young and must learn how to function as a mountain person, he lives with his grandparents in the sheltering safety of their mountain. When he is taken away from the mountain, he proves that he is not ready to face the world because he does not yet know how to handle being away from his family or the mountain. He still needs the mountain because he still has a lot to learn. It is only after he has learned all the lessons and is ready to live his own life that he is able to successfully leave the mountain, because the mountain has nothing left to teach him. The next time he finds a mountain upon which to live, it is much smaller than the one he lived on when he was young, and this physical difference also symbolizes the fact that because he has little left to learn, the new mountain does not need to be big or insurmountable. It simply needs to be.
Whiskey
Whiskey plays a key role in Little Tree’s development. It is the trade that he learns from Granpa, and it is the trade he tries to protect from others who want to infringe on their business. He is made partial owner of the mark at an early age, and he only gives up the mark and whiskey-making when he no longer feels worthy of it. This makes whiskey a motif for the theme of The Value of Quality Work.
When Granpa and Little Tree are at the crossroads store selling their whiskey, Little Tree encounters the daughter of a sharecropper, someone who works hard but cannot get very far because they only get small percentages of what they produce for their bosses. Little Tree tries to share his own success by sharing his grandmother’s work with the little girl and giving her a pair of moccasins. Her father rejects the gift because he will not accept charity. Until Granpa recontextualizes the man’s rejection as pride in his own work, Little Tree is unable to understand why he refuses such a helpful gift. Putting his refusal in this new context allows Little Tree to understand that just as quality whiskey-making is what makes him proud, other individuals have other trades and careers that their pride depends on. This revelation allows him to better understand others’ motives.
Even when the characters are not actively making whiskey, the motif has a tendency to appear in scenes that focus upon the quality, or lack of quality, of work that other people do. Whiskey therefore brings Granpa and Little Tree together because they are most efficient when they work together to complete tasks. After his grandfather’s death, Little Tree finds that he is no longer able to make quality whiskey and cannot contribute quality work to the community on his grandparents’ mountain. When he realizes this, he gives up whiskey-making and buries the still that he and his grandfather used. He would rather see their tools destroyed than see them go to others who might use them to make subquality whiskey.
The Dog Star
A later chapter of the novel introduces the Dog Star, a star that is easily recognized by all members of Little Tree’s family. When the lawyers take Little Tree from his grandparents, the family agrees to look up at the Dog Star each evening and know that they are thinking about each other. The chapter then elaborates these scenes into full communications that the star sends between the family members, where Little Tree receives impressions of what is happening on the mountain and sends his grandparents responses in return, including his desire to come home. This significant chapter makes the Dog Star a symbol of interpersonal connection and a physical representation of the “kinning” concept discussed earlier in the novel.
Through the star, Little Tree can understand not only his family, but Willow John as well. This is because he has a deep connection with both his grandparents and Willow John and is therefore able to use the star as a vehicle for communicating with them. Because Little Tree understands them, he can imagine what they would be saying to him if they were physically present with him. The novel therefore uses the symbol of the Dog Star to represents the messages that pass implicitly between the family members. In practical terms, this is a more poetic way for Carter to convey the idea that because Little Tree understands his family so well, he can easily imagine their reactions to his current predicament so far from home.
