The Man Who Planted Trees

How does Giono convey the trauma the narrator experienced during World War I and the Battle of Verdun? How does the story benefit from the author’s “less is more” approach toward depicting the narrator’s inner life?

Place the story in the context of the postwar modernist movement. How do Giono’s themes and techniques differ from the ones found in works like T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”? How are they similar?

Describe the role played by allegory in the story. Do you consider the story chiefly an environmental allegory or an antiwar allegory? How do these two allegorical strands reinforce one another?

Why do the narrator and the people who come to live around the forest find so much hope in the ecosystem Bouffier built? How does that sense of hope move and spread through the community like a contagion?

What does the story imply about Giono’s attitude toward governments and other institutional bodies in serving the needs of humanity? How do the author’s own experiences inform this attitude? And is this focus on individual contributions to remediating environmental damage problematic in an era of climate change, which many believe demands widespread and coordinated action?