This edition of Non-Slop Fun contains spoilers for Brandon Sanderson’s Tress of the Emerald Sea. But, like, you should still read it if you enjoy literary analysis. 

Okay, now that the spoiler-averse are gone, let’s dive in. 

Tress of the Emerald Sea is a novel by Brandon Sanderson that he originally wrote in secret as a project for his wife, and which came to light following his record-breaking Kickstarter campaign that raised just over $41 million to publish four of his secret projects. 

Initially, I picked up Tress because I had never read any of Sanderson’s work despite him being one of the most eminent figures in modern fantasy. I knew he had several trilogies and series that are highly regarded, but I wasn’t quite ready to commit to a full series at this point (I’ll note that I did not realize how many books followed Dungeon Crawler Carl when I read that one). 

There, in the aisle of Joseph Beth Booksellers in Lexington, KY, I pulled out my phone and searched “standalone Brandon Sanderson books” to see what my options were. Tress of the Emerald Sea was the first result, so I bought it. 

(As an aside, I’ll confess that I misread the title as “TREES of the Emerald Sea” until I was a solid fifty pages into the book.)

Going in with minimal expectations, I found the pages of this book absurd, delightful, and intriguing in ways I hadn’t expected. What Sanderson manages to do with this novel is create a modern fable about an everywoman, inviting readers to reflect on the value of the mundane and the importance of a sense of common humanity, told through the voice of what I have dubbed a Deus Ex Idiot narrator. 

From the very start of the book, Sanderson paints a picture of the story’s protagonist– Tress– as a plain, salt-of-the-earth kind of gal. He writes, “The girl, however, might be as you imagined– assuming you imagined her as thoughtful, soft-spoken, and overly fond of collecting cups.” Following two paragraphs that debate whether her hair was the color of wheat or a plain, light brown, he goes on to write, “The girl had been given the unfortunate name of Glorf upon her birth (don’t judge; it was a family name), but her wild hair earned her the name everyone knew her by: Tress. That moniker was, in Tress’s estimation, her most interesting feature.” 

As a reader, we’re almost beaten over the head with how plain Tress is as a young woman. She comes from a poor family and performs physical labor to help her family make ends meet, specifically as a window washer for the manor of her home island’s Duke. She cooks, cleans, spends time with her family, and falls in love with the Duke’s son, Charlie. 

In his seminal work Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye proposes a comprehensive taxonomy of literature based on the protagonist's "power of action" relative to other humans and their environment. Frye divides literature into five fictional modes: mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic. I’ll refrain from going into each of these in depth, but I bring up this framework because Tress is situated as a prototypical low-mimetic character. Low mimetic characters in this context are those who are superior to neither other people nor their environment.  They’re portrayed as “one of us” kinds of characters and are often at home in realistic fiction, comedy, and domestic narratives.

Importantly, though, low mimetic characters– the everyman kinds of characters– are often able to act as a stand-in for a wider audience. Tress is not a hero through divine intervention, nobility, power, or exceptional talent. She’s driven by the desire to do the right thing (and save Charlie), and is in a constant cycle of subverting threats through reflection, humility, and acting in accordance with her conscience. 

Fables– particularly concerning the everyman archetype- have a rich history in the oral tradition of being a vehicle equally for conveying moral lessons or subverting structures of power. In Tress, we get a bit of both. The text invites us to consider how Tress’ acts of heroism and bravery, such as escaping the Oot’s Dream by walking across the surface of the spore sea, are ultimately acts that anyone could perform when driven by motivations that are bigger than their own self-preservation. 

However, unlike the 15th-century morality play, Everyman (or The Summoning of Everyman), Tress’ story doesn’t feel didactic and outright moralizing, largely because of the nature of the book’s narrator: Hoid the cabin boy, a comedic relief character prone to wearing outlandish outfits and speaking in circuitous, half-formed riddles… and who is also somewhat omniscient. 

A little over one-third of the way through the book, the narrator takes a more active role in providing exposition and commentary on what is happening within the narrative. It was at the start of chapter 24 that I grabbed a pen and wrote in the margins, “This is a sort of meta intertextual commentary by a narrator who presents a 3rd person PoV he can’t actually have. Is there something post-modern or absurdist here worth teasing out?” In fact, dear reader, I think it is worth teasing out. 

We meet Hoid fairly early in the narrative in a passing comment, but he becomes one of the named cast of characters after Tress has gotten entangled with the pirates aboard The Crow’s Song. 

Sanderson writes, 

Importantly, Hoid has been our narrator throughout the entire novel. Though not clearly indicated up until the point that we get the yes, that’s me from him, he’s been the narrator the entire time, as evidenced by the book’s occasional slip into the second person as he addresses you, the reader, with his commentary. What makes this significant is that for much of what happens in the first half of the book, Hoid was not present. This means that he is either relaying his interpretation of how Tress ended up on her adventure, or he preternaturally knows how she did. Despite the character of Hoid as described in the events of the novel being depicted as a fool, Hoid the narrator seems entirely lucid and generally reliable. 

Over the course of the story, we learn that Hoid is under the effects of a curse, which he willingly took on in order to win a bet against the novel’s primary non-nature antagonist, the Sorceress. Once the curse is broken, he reveals that he isn’t just Hoid the cabin boy, but something akin to a sorcerer, and the only being on the planet with the power to challenge the Sorceress. 

Perhaps this would have been obvious to anyone who has read more of Sanderson’s work. Hoid, Wikipedia informs me, is a recurring character in several of Sanderson’s novels. Coppermind, the Brandon Sanderson wiki, has an entry for Hoid, which opens with “Hoid is a worldhopper and Dawnshard that travels the cosmere, originally born on the planet Yolen before the Shattering. He was one of the major figures in the Shattering of Adonalsium, but avoided taking up a Shard himself, instead choosing to wander the cosmere pursuing his unknown goals, often in the guise of a fool or storyteller.” Much of that context is meaningless to me– Dawnshard? Shattering of Adonalsium? Shard? But what tracks is that he travels between worlds, often under the guise of a fool or storyteller, which is exactly how we find him in Tress.

The particular passage that caught my attention and made me ponder the meta nature of narration came just after Tress stops to consider whether her plan is wise or if she might have jumped to conclusions. Following this, Hoid relays to us,

It should be noted that Tress is also quite kind and humble, consistently putting others' well-being ahead of her own comfort throughout the novel. Yet I think it’s in the passage above, where Hoid compares her to more conventional heroes of folklore, that we see the book's ethos taking shape. It’s, in many ways, a celebration of being practical and thoughtful. About considering the consequences of your actions, especially those that harm others, especially when your harmful actions were originally born out of good intentions. 

As fables often instill virtuous lessons and challenge our assumptions, I think Tress continues that tradition. In an economic and political climate that prioritizes profit and power at any cost, with “the ends justify the means” seemingly the dominant philosophy in the United States, a quaint story that heralds the opposite is quite refreshing.  

Until next time, 

Blake