The People in the Trees

From the very beginning of the novel, the author uses the front matter to establish the inherent unreliability of Norton as a narrator and even of Dr. Kubodera as an editor, for the former’s account is skewed by his own narcissistic tendencies, and the latter’s editing is heavily biased by his desire to shield portray his friend and colleague in the most positive light possible under the circumstances. Even so, as the fictitious “memoir” relates the details of Norton’s early childhood and adult life, it is clear that the loneliness that blossoms in his life stems from a lackluster childhood and the multiple disappointments he experiences from his parents. Followed by an equally disappointing college era that fails to live up to Norton’s expectations of melding science with adventure, Part 2 ends with Norton preparing to depart for U’ivu to put his ideals into practice and find the adventure he so desperately seeks. His early struggles to connect with his family, and later with his fellow students and colleagues, represent a lifelong trend: He often displays the need to draw lofty distinctions between his own aims and those of the people who surround him, often disparaging their goals on the basis of high-sounding yet vague ideals. This section of the novel thus serves as foreshadowing for many of the conflicts and difficulties that he will create for himself as his scientific endeavors and career develop. As the story unfolds, the dramatic irony of knowing his ultimate destination in a place of ignominy and disgrace colors every event of his life. By tainting the protagonist with the looming allegations of the sexual assault of children, the author has primed readers to interpret every aspect of this memoir with the most critical eye possible.

Given the nature of his childhood and adolescence, Norton is primed to view his surroundings through the detached lens of Loneliness Within Community, for whether it is his increasing lack of connection with his brother, Owen, or his disappointment in the seemingly mundane goals of his scientific colleagues, Norton makes it a point to hold himself apart from those around him. He therefore approaches the world with a sense of loneliness and a predilection to finding himself disappointed in others. As he says of his family, “[P]arents disappoint us in so many ways and it is best not to expect anything of them at all, for chances are that they won’t be able to deliver it” (28). Norton would rather expect nothing of those around him than be disappointed when they fail to not live up to his wants and needs. This early development of an isolationist mindset supports the novel’s larger theme of Loneliness Within Community, for which Norton often has access to many communities around him and yet struggles to connect with any of them, haunted by a sinking feeling of always being alone. As a child and an adolescent, he desperately needs his parents to support and guide him, but they cannot, leaving him instead to forge his own path and guide himself through his early years as best he can.

Norton therefore spends a large part of the novel building his own community in a variety of ways, either through the camaraderie of a few trusted colleagues, and much later, through a radical and controversial approach to adoption and child-rearing. And yet, both communities will eventually crumble in the face of one of his adopted son’s allegations of sexual abuse. Within the early pages of his memoirs, Norton alludes to these later difficulties and describes the realization of his greatest fear, declaring, “I am living a strange kind of life, a life in which I have no one. My children are gone and my colleagues are gone; everyone who has ever mattered to me has left me” (52). Norton describes feeling alone at every stage of his life no matter who is around him, and yet now that he is in prison, he is truly alone, and there is no community at all. In the final years before his downfall, the narrative relates that Norton surrounds himself with his adopted children to try and recapture the feeling of love he once felt toward Owen and then toward the boys on Ivu’ivu. Norton also admits that as a youth, he didn’t truly know love until his trip with Owen to Italy, for he states, “And although it was never as intense as it was that day on the water, I grew to first accept and then long for that familiar ache, even though I knew that while experiencing it I was unable to accomplish, much less contemplate, anything else” (55). Norton’s subsequent isolation from this transient experience of love also fuels him in his drive to develop his career, and though he will always struggle to find that elusive sense of love in life, he will seek it constantly.

This part of the novel also focuses on Norton’s experiences with the rarified academic world of Harvard, and once again his sense of Loneliness Within Community is exacerbated, for he struggles to fit in with his colleagues in Dr. Smythe’s lab, seeing them as being selfishly motivated and distracted from the adventure of science itself. Norton sees himself as a bit of an outsider and tries his best to forge a different path from those around him; his innate assumption that he is somehow above the endeavors of his colleagues and more special and gifted than those around him also betrays his own narcissistic tendencies. Ironically, he is also very aware of the rampant Narcissism in Academics and is even repulsed by it, as evidenced by his flight from the dinner event at the home of Dr. Smythe, who states that Norton was hired because he reminds Dr. Smythe of himself. This admission creates a panic in Norton, who states:

I was terrified that I might become him, although it was not until some years later […] that I was able to define why: [it] […] was his small, inexplicable life alone in that strange house, with no one around to distract him from the meagerness of his own existence (81).

Not only does this interaction strike a chord with Norton’s fears of loneliness, but it also demonstrates to Norton how the selfish and singular pursuit of fame over discovery can lead to a lackluster and unfulfilling life. It also shows that despite his attempts to reject the very concept of narcissism, Norton is also highly susceptible to it, for even his compulsion to compare Dr. Smythe’s work and life unfavorably to his own goals and disparage Dr. Smythe’s scientific work, knowing that he can do better, betrays his own deeply narcissistic behavior patterns.