The old man’s sticks (Symbol)
The old man’s sticks symbolize the burden of mortal life. As he gets older and weaker, the old man bends more and more under the weight of his burden. Similarly, the older we get, the more tragedy and disappointment we carry around with us. However, when the bird loosens the sticks from the old man's back, he panics. This is because, bitter as he is, he has come to see himself as inextricable from the burden he carries. Ultimately, TI-Jean picks up these sticks and carries them himself. His realization at his mother’s deathbed has made him more optimistic about the beauty of life, and he is thus able to carry the burden of mortality without being taken over by it.
Planter and old-man masks (Symbols)
Throughout the play, the Devil conceals himself behind the planter and the old-man masks. Both the planter and the old man are characters in their own right. However, their masks also symbolize that the Devil hides in ordinary people. This suggests that evil does not take only one form, but can rather enter our lives in many unexpected ways. It is therefore necessary to build up wisdom in order to identify evil in all its forms.
The old man as “worldly wisdom” (Allegory)
When the animals speak to Ti-Jean about the old man, they call him “worldly wisdom.” In other words, the old man is a personification of the abstract idea of “worldly wisdom,” or the way of knowing the world based only on the things of this world. In the play, worldly wisdom is pessimistic and defeatist; it tells the brothers there is no option other than submitting to the planter, and that struggling is pointless because death is inevitable. Mother and the animals embody other forms of wisdom with more room for hope.
Tedious Tasks (Motif)
Throughout the play, the characters spend much of their time engaged in tedious and repetitive work. Mother spends all day scrubbing the bare hut, Gros Jean works in the fields without a break, the planter’s goat constantly escapes and has to be tied up again and again, and the Devil tries to make Ti-Jean count all the leaves in the fields. These tasks strip life of its joy and amplify the tension of the work: life is both meaningful and full of suffering.
Poverty (Motif)
At the beginning of the play, the Jean family is represented on stage by a bare, empty hut. The animals stress that they are cold and hungry. Throughout the play, the brothers travel with very little of their own: Mi-Jean has his book, Gros Jean his strength, Ti-Jean nothing at all. The old man is also poor, having left his work as a woodman, and carrying nothing with him but the bundle of sticks he struggles to carry. This omnipresent poverty is juxtaposed with the wealth of the planter, a difference in economic power that determines much of what the brothers can do to fight back. At the same time, the fact that the heroes of the play are all poor stresses that the fundamental meaning of life stems from intangible things like emotions, rather than physical possessions.
