@XYLENE I don't know if this is apocryphal, but I heard that the tree and kid were stand-ins for God and humans, respectively. Read that way, you could see it more as a criticism of humans than a glorification of codependence / selfishness / whatever.
@Goshawk I guess I found the book a message that "things will be ok, even in a finite world, you'll be ok through life." Which as a child I found mildly resonant, if a little clumsy, as other children did. I remember talking about in Reading class. We worried at about death and privation a lot. Also it is the lifecycle of a tree compared to a person, and they both end the book dead.
I find the codependency angle is really a bit of a stretch as an interpretation, done on purpose to score snark points in at least the key citations from literary criticism. Also taking the personification of a tree into personhood is a little bizzare, or at least a little hyperbolic.
I find the codependency angle is really a bit of a stretch as an interpretation, done on purpose to score snark points in at least the key citations from literary criticism. Also taking the personification of a tree into personhood is a little bizzare, or at least a little hyperbolic.