After finding out that Buddy was not as innocient as she, Esther become very upset at the thought of Buddy . As she laid in bed, Esther opens the book sent to her by the ladies day magazine stuff. She goes through the book and she a story about a fig free. The Fig tree grew on a green lawn between the house of a jewish man and a beautiful nun. The nun the jewish man meet under the tree and they continously kept meeting under the tree. One day as they watch an egg hatching in a birds nest, they touched hands. The next day the nun didn’t come out anymore to pick fig fruits. Esther compares the story to her relationship with Buddy. They had meet in their own imaginary fig tree, and after seeing a baby coming out of a women; they went their separate ways. Later in the novel, i believe the fig tree becomes a symbol of the life choices the Esther faces. For instance her constant attempt to kill herself.
The first fig is believed to be native to Western Asia and has been distrubuted by man throughout the Mediterranean sea. The fig tree is small dimensional tree that has numerous branches and a trunk rarely more than 7in in diameter. It consist of a copious milky latex and tiny flowers are massed inside the cell wall. The tree varies in color such as yellowish to copper, bronze or dark purple and the skin is thin and tender. The fig can be grown in a large range of soil, such as light sand, rich loam, and heavy clay or limestone. There are many culivated variities in each fig class. In fact there is about 700 different kinds. The most popular ones are Celeste and Brown turkey. Some fig are used for eating out the hand and others can be dried into coffee. In mediterranean countries, low grade gigs are converted in alcohol.
I absolutely love the fig tree reference! I wish I had been the one to write about it. hehe I actually sent it to my best friend when I first read it, since it’s something we’re going through now — trying to decide which of our beloved art projects to give more attention, and still work to pay the bills and dedicate time to school. Oh, life; why so hard?
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
Ahh the fig tree. This is like the imagining of all of the things Esther could be but won’t because she is paralyzed with indecision. The scene with the fig free stands as a reflection of the unfairly diverse choices that society is forcing Esther to choose from.