The Arboreal Narrator in Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees: A mitigating agent against Anthropocentrism

The accelerating climate crisis demands a critical reassessment of anthropocentrism, the worldview that privileges human centrality and legitimizes the exploitation of non-human life. This paper examines how The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak offers a literary challenge to anthropocentric thought through its most innovative narrative strategy: the fig tree as primary narrator. By granting voice, memory, and witness to a non-human entity, the novel destabilizes the human/non-human binary that underpins dominant epistemologies. Drawing on ecocritical and posthumanist frameworks, this study argues that the arboreal narrator reconfigures narrative authority and expands the ethical horizon of the text. The tree’s perspective situates human histories of war, displacement, and migration within broader ecological temporalities, thereby decentering human experience and foregrounding interspecies interconnectedness. Rather than functioning merely as a symbolic device, the tree becomes an agentive consciousness that invites readers to inhabit a more-than-human worldview. Through qualitative textual analysis, the paper demonstrates how Shafak’s narrative strategy challenges assumptions about agency, memory, and testimony as exclusively human domains. Ultimately, the arboreal narrator operates as a mitigating force against anthropocentrism by cultivating ecological empathy and reimagining coexistence across species boundaries. In doing so, The Island of Missing Trees emerges as a significant contemporary text that models an ethics of relationality urgently needed in the Anthropocene.