83 pages • 2 hours read
Octavia E. ButlerParable of the Sower
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-3 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: The guide and source material reference violence, including child abuse.
The year is 2024. Lauren, the narrator, speaks in the first person as if she’s writing in her dated journal. She begins this chapter by talking about a dream she had: She is learning to fly but runs into a fire. Describing the fire, she writes, “It blazes up around me. I thrash and scramble and try to swim back of it, grabbing handfuls of air and fire, kicking, burning. Darkness” (14).
Later, she is talking with her stepmother, Cory, about the stars as they hang laundry. Their neighborhood is surrounded by a wall that is a “massive, looming presence” (15). Cory says they couldn’t see stars when she was a child because the city lights obscured them—“lights, progress, growth, all those things we’re too hot and too poor to bother with anymore” (15). Lauren says she’d rather have the stars. Cory, on the other hand, says she’d rather have the city lights back, but “the stars are free.” (16).
Chapter 2 Summary
Lauren and her family go to a neighboring church run by the Reverend Robinson so that Lauren can be baptized; their own church, where her father is the minister, was burned down. She feels like a coward since she no longer believes in her father’s God. For the six other kids, including Lauren’s 12-year-old brother Keith and Lauren’s love interest, Curtis Talcott, the outing is an adventure. They see dead people, a naked and dazed woman, poor neighborhoods, dirty children, and cracked streets along the way.
Lauren explains that they live in Robledo, a town 20 miles away from Los Angeles. The wall protects them from the street poor, and she notes that it is “[c]razy to live without a wall to protect you” (20). When she is in their space, her “hyperempathy” makes her feel the misery of the people around her. She can share pleasure, too, but people rarely feel pleasure. She feels jumpy but knows she must keep her “sharing” a secret: “Better to have them think anything than let them know just how easy it is to hurt me” (23).
They arrive at the church. There are only five or six dozen people at the service, and the baptism goes as planned. The kids wear white gowns, and Lauren goes last. She thinks her father has done this to teach her humility, which she finds unnecessary: “I think my particular biological humility—or humiliation—is more than enough” (24).
Lauren starts to contemplate the nature of God. The idea of God is often on her mind, and she questions if God is “a big-daddy-God” or even simply “nature” (24). She continues to ruminate on the possibilities: “So what is God? Just another name for whatever makes you feel special and protected?” (24). She thinks about a storm in the Gulf of Mexico and wonders if the people there still have faith.
Chapter 3 Summary
Lauren narrates the latest news: An astronaut on the latest Mars mission died when something went wrong with her protective suit. One presidential candidate, Christopher Morpeth Donner, has promised to abolish the space program if elected. Her father agrees the resources are needed elsewhere, but Lauren does not. She believes that colonizing space might help, though she feels she is in the minority: “Well, we’re barely a nation at all anymore, but I’m glad we’re still in space. We have to be going some place other than down the toilet” (30). Lauren intends to take the astronaut, Alicia Catalina Godinez Leal, as a role model. She calls Mars “heaven in a way” (31).
A neighbor, Mrs. Sims, dies by suicide after she is robbed and her distant son and his family perish in a fire. For Lauren, the Mars death and Mrs. Sims’s death start to get tangled together. She decides she needs to start writing down her beliefs, even though she has a lot of work to do in the house and at the school where she teaches the neighborhood children. As she ruminates more on the nature of God, she wonders: “[W]hy can’t I do what others have done—ignore the obvious. Live a normal life. It’s hard enough just to do that in this world” (36). However, her idea of a new philosophy will not leave her alone. She decides that she must do something about it.
The last bit of news Lauren relates is that Donner has won the presidential election and plans to dismantle the Moon and Mars programs. Donner’s platform includes a plan to help people by suspending wage, environmental, and worker protection laws for employers willing to provide room and board for the homeless. Lauren sees problems with this.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The first three chapters of the book take place in 2024 when Lauren is 15. The narrative does not take place in a postapocalyptic world but in what can be described as an actual apocalyptic occurrence. These characters are in the very middle of their society’s destruction. The book was published in 1993, which makes 2024 the near future. The future depicted in Parable of the Sower is not full of far-reaching scientific and space technology; though the space program is sending humans to Mars, marking an advancement, the narrative focuses on the human condition. The text is straightforward, and the language is both simple and poetic. Butler paints a bleak setting with little hope and few bright spots—only small and momentary pleasures.
The book is written from the perspective of first-person narrator Lauren. Originally transcribed as diary entries, these have been adapted into “Earthseed: The Books of the Living.” While Lauren’s religion, Earthseed, only emerges later in the novel, this structure creates a metanarrative frame, presenting Lauren’s diary as a religious text—these diaries are her gospels. This creates a sense of foreshadowing or anticipation about the novel’s events—Lauren is quoted by her full name in the Epigraph, indicating that by the end of Parable of the Sower, she becomes a leader and respected thinker.
Lauren relates her circumstances and thoughts about the life she lives in a dying world, which is full of criminals who rape, pillage, and murder. Her narrative introduces her potential as a prophet, as she coalesces her ideas about God in defiance of her father’s beliefs. In the very first chapter, her dream and conversation with her stepmother, Cory, differentiate her. Cory likes the artificial city lights as symbols of “lights, progress, growth, all those things we’re too hot and too poor to bother with anymore” (15). Lauren, on the other hand, sees hope in the stars, positioning her as someone who is forward-thinking rather than someone who clings to the past. This is reinforced by Lauren’s father’s adherence to his Baptist faith, in contrast to her indifference. Rather than adhering to an ancient worldview, Lauren adopts Religion as a Living Framework for Hope and Change.
Butler uses the other early chapters in the novel for worldbuilding. As Lauren and her family travel through the risky outside, Butler introduces jarring imagery of the common sights in this world—dead bodies, naked women, trash, and filthy children. This continues when Lauren shares anecdotes about the families in the neighborhood and the deprivations the families suffer. As with Mrs. Sims, these constant threats and sudden violent deaths are enough to test the faith of everyone who lives in this world. While people everywhere suffer, the wall separating Lauren’s neighborhood from the outside is a stark image that introduces the theme of Class Divisions and Inequality. At this moment, Lauren can’t imagine living without the wall to protect her, but her early meditations on space travel show that entering the broader world will be necessary for survival.
One more important detail in this section is Lauren’s hyperempathy, which allows her to feel others’ emotions—good and bad. This sets the ground for the book’s larger discussion of Community Versus the Individual—while many believe that only self-preservation can help one survive this new chaotic world, Lauren’s journey shows that survival is only possible in the group. Just as Mrs. Sims despairs at being left alone after her family’s death, no one person can make it through alone.
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