The Man Who Planted Trees

The story’s treatment of the narrator’s wartime trauma is a deeply affecting example of the power of subtext. The narrator’s trauma does not manifest in explicit ways. Rather, it bubbles under the surface, as when the narrator retreats to Provence after the war out of “a great desire to breathe some fresh air”—a subtle reference to the chlorine gas and other chemical weapons used against French troops during World War I. Upon remembering Bouffier’s existence, the narrator casually believes the man is dead—a morbid assumption rooted in the massive number of dead bodies the narrator encountered during the war. At another point, Bouffier casually mentions the year 1915, to which the narrator adds as an aside is the year of the Battle of Verdun. Particularly for French audiences reading the book in 1953, the mention of Verdun would evoke images of that long and costly battle, which holds enormous symbolic weight in the French collective consciousness. And finally, the extent of the narrator’s post-traumatic stress disorder is merely implied, with great subtlety, when he remarks that the burgeoning ecosystem Bouffier created gives him “some reason for living” (19).

Rather than describe in detail the poison gas, the gruesome deaths, and the stench of corpses, the author conveys the narrator’s trauma through subtext, rendering his psychic pain as an ever-present sense of despair, always rumbling under the surface of his perceptions and interactions.