The Bean Trees Analysis

Importance of Family and Friendship

The effects of loneliness and friendship affect you and probably everyone around you in everyday life. In Barbara Kingsolver's book The Bean Trees, she uses the characters to represent everyday feelings, struggles, and success. This book shares the story of struggle, hardships, loneliness, friendship, and growth between the characters and how they come to know each other and grow closer throughout the book. Taylor, Lou Anne, and Turtle rely on each other for their friendship and feeling of family, so that they are emotionally strong, and can strive like the bean trees that rely on the riboza bugs to protect them.

Turtle at the beginning of the book is just a young girl whose mother has died. When Taylor

Turtle has been through many hardships throughout her short life so far, and this causes her to remain quiet and not to make any mistakes. She does not wet her pants, she doesn’t cry, she doesn’t ask for anything, and just keeps to herself. In Turtle’s doing so this makes Taylor think that, "Turtle's main goal in life, other than hanging onto things, seemed to be to pass unnoticed" (105). Because Turtle has been through a lot she probably does this because she is scared to know what might happen to her is she stands out because when she was little she was beaten and abused and this caused her to fear. When she was with Taylor at first she didn’t dare to say anything and this is what made her seem to want to go unnoticed. The longer she was with Taylor, the more she came out of of her comfort zone and the less unnoticed she tried to be. Turtle is similar to bean trees because she was beaten and broken, like the bean tree when they get old, and it’s almost like she completely planted herself and changed into someone completely different. When bean trees get old and broken they replant themselves like turtle did.

The characters in The Bean Tree all rely on each other in order to thrive and when they didn’t have each other, they had many more struggles. When Taylor is alone she struggles to fed her and Turtle. She also struggles finding them a place to stay.

Lou Ann starts to thrive because of the help and support of taylor who in this case is the rhizobia.

People change you in so many ways that you might not even realize it. Turtle was probably changed the most by her new family and friends. At the beginning of the book she would not dare to say a word however by the end of the book she was singing. After Taylor had shown Turtle the adoption papers she just nodded her head and they were on their way Taylor was paying attention to Turtle and Kingsolver writes: “She watched the dark highway and entertained me with her vegetable soup song, except that now there were people mixed in with the beans and potatoes: Dwayne Ray, Mattie, Esperanza, Lou Ann and all the rest. "And me. I was the main ingredient."” (312). To Turtle, the most important things in life are the people around her that care about her. This shows how important it is to have people who love and support you in life because that is what will make you happy. This shows the importance of Taylor to Turtle, and proves that even when Taylor was thrown into a very difficult situation she took it and turned it into something wonderful. As Catherine Himmelwright writes in her