A Metaphor for Unconditional Parental Love
The most common and popular interpretation of this story is that it is a metaphor for the unconditional love of a parent for a child. In this interpretation, the tree which is referred to as “she” and “her” is a symbol for the boy’s mother. No matter how much he takes advantage of her and no matter how much selfishness he demonstrates, her love for “the boy” never waver even as he become an elderly man.
A Metaphor for Environmentalism
Another popular interpretation is that the story is a metaphor for environmental exploitation. The boy takes and takes and takes from the tree until he manages to exploit every last remaining use of the tree. His selfish use of the tree is compounded by the fact that he gives nothing in return. This is a metaphor for the ravaging of natural resources through actions ranging from strip mining to fracking to deforestation without renewing the natural landscape and instead leaving it scarred and useless.
A Metaphor for Gender Inequality
Still another interpretation implicates the use of the feminine pronoun for the tree as a metaphor not to be limited merely to a mother/son relationship. In this interpretation, the tree represents all women and unequal relationship between the tree and the boy is a metaphor for the male chauvinism and exploitative interrelationships between men and women at all levels of society.
A Metaphor for Capitalism
A much narrow—yet still robustly apt—interpretation of the story focuses on the metaphor of the boy as a symbol of capitalist greed. In this interpretation, the tree becomes a metaphor for everyone else who must suffer at the hands of the boy’s greed. The boy’s insistence on pillaging the tree of its available resources to meet his own goals is a broadly encompassing metaphor which can be directly applied to everything from the capitalist ownership class making billions off the back of underpaid workers whose life is a continual struggle to meet their own needs to financial scandals like the S&L crisis and the 2008 Wall Street meltdown. The boy’s decision to build his boat is here symbolic of the last final exploitative act in which they used their ill-gotten gains to escape legal responsibility.
A Metaphor for Christian Charity
That the tree in the story is quite specifically an apple tree has led some to view the story as less a metaphorical tale and more a religious parable. The significance of the apple tree alludes, of course, to the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden and Eve’s temptation of Adam with forbidden fruit which has traditionally been displayed using an apple. Based on that connection, the metaphor is extended to portray the unconditional love and unquestioned—indeed, the willing—giving of itself to even the most uncharitable of souls as the very definition of the Christian tenet that it is better to give than to receive.
