In the Lake of the Woods: Love and Relationships

Love and RelationshipsTheme Analysis

          While In the Lake of the Woods is a mystery and a war novel, it’s also a love story. The characters are motivated by their love for other people, and, perhaps even more importantly, their desire to be loved in return. One of O’Brien’s most important points is that the way people express their love for one another often parallels the way they loved and were loved by their families. John Wade’s tense relationship with his father—his father is a charming, likable man, but also an alcoholic who verbally abuses his son and later hangs himself—has a major influence on the way John treats his friends and wife. The absence of unconditional love from his father makes John crave love from other people, and inspires him to perform magic tricks and take up politics as a career. He wants other people to love him so that he feels happier, but he often shows little respect for these other people. Indeed, he controls and manipulates them, as if they’re tools whose only use is to make him feel better about himself.

          At the same time, John wants to love other people—he tells Kathy that he wants to go into politics to help people. It wouldn’t be right to say that John is lying when he says this to Kathy. In reality, John’s idea of love is both sincere and insincere. He’s torn between treating people as means to an end and respecting them for their own thoughts and feelings.

          Kathy’s love for John is as complicated as John’s love for her. She recognizes that John “needs” love to a greater extent than other people, and for the most part, she is happy to supply it, even when it isn’t returned. Patricia, Kathy’s sister, often criticizes Kathy for putting up with John’s rudeness and manipulation—at one point, we discover that Kathy knows that John follows her wherever she goes, and doesn’t do anything about it. For much of her marriage to John, Kathy seems to think of love as an act of unconditional giving. She loves John, and seems to be satisfied with being a means to the end of his happiness.

          The love between John and Kathy, or between John and the people of Minnesota whom he serves, is based on the denial of information. John hides his own personal history, both from Kathy and his constituents, but insists on knowing everything about other people, using manipulation and deception to gain this information. The most obvious problem with this kind of love is that it doesn’t last. Eventually, Kathy responds to John’s deception with deception of her own—she has an affair with a dentist named Harmon. Similarly, the voters of Minnesota eventually learn about John’s experiences in Vietnam, and end their “relationship” with John.

          Toward the end of his book, O’Brien implies another model of what love could be. Instead of being an asymmetric relationship, with one lover keeping secrets yet demanding to know everything about his partner, love could consists of the reciprocal exchange of information, based on mutual respect. Thus, John and Kathy could exchange some but not all of their secrets with one another, providing sympathy and support as they do so. There’s no guarantee that John and Kathy reach this kind of love, or if it’s even possible. O’Brien leaves it up to the reader to decide if John and Kathy learn from their mistakes and develop a more equal relationship.

LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS THEMETRACKER

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Love and Relationships appears in each chapter of In the Lake of the Woods. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.

IN THE LAKE OF THE WOODS CHAPTER 1 SUMMARY & ANALYSIS

          The novel begins with two unnamed characters who, in the aftermath of a primary election, decide to rent a cottage in a place called Lake of the Woods. In the area surrounding the cottage, there are no people or towns whatsoever. The cottage has a beautiful view of the lake, which points north to Canada. The two people have come to Lake of the Woods for solitude, and to be together.

          O’Brien begins his novel on a note of uncertainty. We don’t know who these people are or what they’re doing, and while we’ll come to know much more about them as the story goes on, the mood of uncertainty will continue.

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          The two characters don’t have sex with each other. They have tried sex before, and it didn’t turn out well, though the narrator doesn’t explain any further. They try to cheer each other up, even though one of the characters has lost the primary election, but they both secretly understand that this was a crushing loss. Instead of talking about the primary, they think of potential names for their children. It’s a very sad time in their lives, and they’re trying to be happy.

          There’s an immediate tension between appearances—how the characters act around each other—and how the characters really feel. Even though we’ve only just met them, we sense that what lies beneath their appearance is too painful and complicated to put into words.

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          The two characters think of places to travel. One character, whose name is Kathy, says that she wants to visit Verona, Italy. She and the other character talk about Verona as if it’s a place where nothing bad ever happens.

We begin to learn more about the characters. Kathy’s conversation with her lover (still unnamed) suggests that she’s a dreamer, always fantasizing about how her life could be better than it is.

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          After six nights in Lake of the Woods, Kathy tells her companion, a man, that things aren’t that bad—together, they can make them better. In less than 36 hours, Kathy will be gone. Nevertheless, she tells her companion that he can get a job with a law firm in Minneapolis, and together they’ll put together a budget and start paying off debts.

For all its metaphysical questions about the nature of appearances versus reality, this novel is also a good mystery. Here, O’Brien makes this very clear by establishing suspense and tension. We know that Kathy is going to disappear—for the rest of the book, we’ll struggle to understand how and why.

          The other character, John Wade, tries to be positive as Kathy talks about her plans. He closes his eyes and pictures a huge mountain crushing him. Still, he kisses Kathy and embraces her. He thinks, in disbelief, about the landslide loss he’s endured in the primary election: he was beaten nearly three to one. He was lieutenant governor when he was 37 years old, and a candidate for the U.S. Senate when he was forty. Now, at forty-one, he is a loser. John is humiliated by his loss—he wants to scream “Kill Jesus!” and cut things with a knife. For years, he has been climbing, slowly—and now everything has come crashing down. As he thinks this, he promises Kathy that they’ll travel to Verona together.

          Even with all the information about John Wade that we learn in this section, it’s not clear what’s going on. Why John lost the election, or why the loss has destroyed his life is left unexplained (plenty of successful politicians have lost elections, after all). The expression, “Kill Jesus” is particularly frightening because it’s unexplained. Clearly, there’s more than an electoral defeat troubling John. At the same time, we see the tension between appearance and inner life once again. As John thinks terrifying thoughts, he continues to smile and talk about baby names and vacations.

          Kathy asks John about having babies. She suggests that she’s too old, but John assures her that they’ll have many children. A short time later, Kathy cries, but denies that she’s crying. She insists that she loves John, and doesn’t care about elections at all. She asks John if he loves her, and he insists that he does. Kathy presses her hand against John’s forehead. Later, when Kathy is gone, John will remember this moment vividly.

O’Brien ends the first chapter on another note of suspense, mentioning for the second time that Kathy will be gone soon. The contrast between the enormity of this prediction and the banality of her behavior creates a sense of dramatic irony that keeps the story interesting: even though we don’t know what’s going on, we know more than Kathy and John do.

IN THE LAKE OF THE WOODS CHAPTER 2 SUMMARY & ANALYSIS

          The chapter consists of many pieces of “evidence.” The first is a quote from Eleanor K. Wade, identified as “mother.” Eleanor says that “he” was always secretive as a child. Further pieces of evidence include an iron teakettle and a large boat. A man named Anthony L. Carbo is quoted as saying that “he” kept everything buried, and never said much to anyone, even his wife.

O’Brien’s book is organized into different kinds of chapters, one of which is the “evidence” chapter. While the purpose of evidence is to aid in the solution to a crime, these pieces of evidence don’t prove anything—they only establish that there is a great mystery at hand. The fact that John has secrets doesn’t tell us anything new (we saw this in the previous chapter), but the fact that he’s always had secrets does “raise the stakes” as we embark on the mystery of Kathy’s disappearance.

          The next piece of evidence is a missing persons report for Kathleen Terese Wade. She is 38, blond and green-eyed, takes valium, and had a pregnancy termination when she was 34. She has a sister, but her next of kin is John Herman Wade. Kathleen worked as a Director of Admissions at the University of Minnesota. A colleague, Bethany Kee, says that she’s sure that Kathy didn’t drown, because she was an excellent swimmer.

Here, in its simplest form, is the information about Kathy’s disappearance. The list of information (height, weight, hair, etc.) is almost comical, because it tells us nothing and everything about her disappearance. There’s a sense that all the statistics about Kathy can’t tell us as much as one casual quote from Kathy’s friend, Bethany. It’s from Bethany that we learn that Kathy’s disappearance must have something to do with the lake we saw in the previous chapter, and also that this makes her disappearance even more suspicious, since she was a gifted swimmer.

          Further quotes and reports inform us that John’s father bullied him when John was a child. John loved his father, Eleanor says, which is why his father’s treatment of him hurt him so deeply. She adds that John was too young to understand alcoholism.

This piece of evidence is important because it’s used to “explain” John—in other words, to suggest that John behaved the way he did because of his father. Ironically, while these quotes should inspire some kind of sympathy for John because they are related to his wife’s mysterious disappearance and since we don’t know what John did at this point in the novel, this explanation actually increases our sense of his guilt instead of minimizing it. As readers we are placed in the position of investigators, which is both exciting and uncomfortable.

          An exhibit shows poll numbers from 1986. On July 3, Wade was leading over Durkee, 58% to 31%. On August 17, Durkee was leading 60% to 21%. Carbo says that the defeat ended John’s career. Carbo had asked John if he had any secrets. John hadn’t said anything. Carbo insists that he didn’t betray John.

Again, the presence of statistics is both helpful and unhelpful—the numbers show us that there was a sudden, unexpected change in John’s popularity, but doesn’t tell us what caused this change. Ironically Carbo’s pronouncement that he “didn’t” betray John only makes us suspicious that he did.

          There are more quotes. Bethany guesses that Kathy is on a bus somewhere, since she didn’t want to stay married to a “creep” like John. Kathy’s sister, Patricia, says she can’t discuss her sister. A waitress named Myra Shaw remembers a loud argument she saw between John and Kathy. Vincent R. Pearson claims that John killed Kathy, an idea that Eleanor rejects as ridiculous. A man named Richard Thinbill complains about “flies,” though he doesn’t specify where he saw them.

We end the chapter with a collection of hypotheses about what happened to Kathy. Part of the delight of this section is the sheer uncertainty we feel. Any of these possibilities could be the truth, for all we know. Some of the possibilities directly contradict each other. All this, in conjunction with the unexplained word “flies,” shows us that we have our work cut out for us: we must decipher the mystery of what happened to Kathy by navigating through the huge number of possibilities for what could have happened.

IN THE LAKE OF THE WOODS CHAPTER 3 SUMMARY & ANALYSIS

John Wade’s father died when John was fourteen years old. After learning of his father’s death, he felt the desire to kill. At the funeral, for instance, he wanted to kill his father, everyone who was crying, and everyone who wasn’t.

This information about John and his father implicates John in Kathy’s death. Clearly, he has the potential to do harm to others—he wants to harm others at a funeral, of all places. At the same time, he was just a kid devastated by the death of his father and lashing out mentally.

Active Themes

          For weeks after his father’s death, John buries his head in his pillow and imagines his father being alive. He imagines the two of them talking about the right way to hit a baseball. Later on, John invents stories for himself about how he could have saved his father’s life by blowing into his father’s mouth and restarting his heart.

John’s behavior following his father’s death shows his capacity for fantasy and deception. He begins by deceiving himself—trying to make himself believe that his father is still alive. This section paints John in a highly sympathetic light—he has no say in his father’s death, even if it has a huge influence on his development.

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          While some of the stories John tells himself comfort him, nothing works for long. John can’t fool himself—his father is dead. Nevertheless, he imagines finding his father in the house, putting him in his pocket, and vowing never to lose him again.

O’Brien suggests that deception never works for long—in the end, the truth is always revealed. This corresponds to what we know about how mysteries work—given enough time, the truth always makes itself known.

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In the Lake of the Woods Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

          On the seventh day that John and Kathy spend at Lake of the Woods, John remembers, nothing much happens. They laugh and chat over breakfast, but as Kathy is washing dishes, John notices her make a low sound and look away from him. 24 hours later, John will remember the distance he feels between Kathy and himself in this moment. He often wonders if she would have disappeared had they made love in the kitchen of the cottage.

Immediately after reading about John’s behavior after his father’s death, we see John engaging in similar behavior: he feels an enormous sense of guilt, as if he’s personally responsible for both his father’s death and his wife’s disappearance. This suggests that John is capable of enormous love for other people.

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          When John speaks to others later on, he cannot remember every detail of his day with Kathy. He does recall, however, that around noon they went to swim in the lake. As they float in the water, John looks across the lake and imagines that he is a winner. Kathy asks him if he’s all right, and John insists, despites Kathy’s skepticism, that he is. Kathy asks again if he’s all right, and John gets annoyed. He later remembers seeing Kathy clench her jaw after he says that he’s fine.

From the beginning, the information we’re given is unreliable—John admits that he can’t remember everything that happened the day before Kathy disappeared (the fact that he’s talking to “others”—perhaps the police—adds more suspense). One wonders if there should be a similar qualifier next to every one of the quotations we’ve read in the previous chapter—evidence is always a little unreliable if it comes from human beings.

          For the rest of the afternoon, Kathy does crosswords and John organizes bills. Feeling “electricity in his blood,” John twice tries to call Tony Carbo, but learns from Tony’s secretary that he’s left for the day. John doesn’t leave a message. He then says “Kill Jesus,” which he finds funny, and unplugs the phone.

The mention of “electricity” is a vivid way of conveying the suspense at this moment—clearly, something is going to happen. The fact that John unplugs the phone seems highly important, given what we know about Kathy’s disappearance—if she leaves the cottage, there’s no way for her to get in touch with her husband.

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          John can’t recall what happened next. He may have napped, or had a drink. He does, however, remember driving into the nearest town with Kathy. During this drive, he feels a pressure in his ears, as if he’s underwater. He and Kathy drive by Pearson’s Texaco station, and a small schoolhouse. John and Kathy arrive in town, park, and pick up some mail they’ve received: a letter from his accountant, and a letter for Kathy from her sister in Minneapolis.

John’s faulty memory seems to correlate to his drinking. Given what we know about John’s father, it would seem that he’s inherited the very qualities that strained his relationship with his father. The “pressure” John feels in his ears seems to foreshadow something, especially because he’s described as feeling as if he’s underwater when we know that Kathy disappeared on (or in) a lake.

          John and Kathy take their mail, go grocery shopping, and then go to a Mini-Mart. Kathy reads her sister’s letter, and complains that her sister has two boyfriends. John finds this “good,” and Kathy responds that men, like politicians, always come in pairs. She says this is a joke, but John isn’t amused. This annoys Kathy, who angrily reminds him, It’s not my fault.” John sees a muscle move in Kathy’s cheek. At 5:24, the waitress who’s serving them at the Mini-Mart notices their argument. Kathy insists, “we lost,” and John responds, “Mr. Monster.”

John and Kathy’s argument is a great example of the “iceberg technique,” referring to what is visible on the surface and what is hidden “beneath the water” —although they seem to be chatting about fairly banal things, we sense that there’s a huge amount of unstated information that’s nonetheless relevant to their conversation. The twitch in Kathy’s cheek is further evidence of the unspoken feeling between them, as is the phrase, “Mr. Monster”—possibly a nickname that John earned during his campaign.

         

Back in their cottage, John and Kathy have some food and listen to music. At 8 pm, they walk around outside and watch the moon. John remembers that Kathy refuses to hold his hand for long, and then walking back inside. For the rest of the evening, they don’t make love; instead, they play backgammon. John brings up “that stuff in the newspapers,” but Kathy focuses on the game. Around 11, John claims, they go to bed. Kathy sounds cheerful, as if she doesn’t know that she’s “going away.”

It’s possible that the tension between John and Kathy is at least partly sexual—based on their earlier argument about romantic partners coming in pairs, and the fact that they don’t make love now. The qualifier, “John claims,” throws into doubt all the information we’ve received thus far—it’s been pulled from people who aren’t necessarily trustworthy or reliable.

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IN THE LAKE OF THE WOODS CHAPTER 5 SUMMARY & ANALYSIS

          This chapter is structured as a “hypothesis.” The first part of the hypothesis is that Kathy has a secret lover. During her seventh day at the cottage with John, Kathy may have been thinking about this lover: a simple, honest man, totally unlike her deceptive, secretive husband. This is only a possibility, the narrator acknowledges.

In this chapter, O’Brien makes explicit what he’s already been implying—we can’t take anything we read at face value. Just as the contents of this chapter are only one possible version of the truth, the testimony we find in the surrounding chapters is equally warped by first-person perspective. Rather than ever get to a point of revealing “this is what happened,” O’Brien circles around all of the things that might have happened. The story is both obsessed with figuring out “the truth” happened and also obsessed with the fact that you never can.

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          Perhaps Kathy couldn’t bear to tell John about her secret lover. She may have staged her own disappearance—this is unlikely, the narrator admits, but not impossible. She could have woken up early, arranged for her lover to pick her up, and driven away.

Even though this chapter is framed as a possibility, it begins to tell us more about John and Kathy’s relationship—the mere possibility that Kathy had a lover is itself an important fact: clearly there was tension between John and Kathy, and clearly some of the tension stemmed from John’s propensity for lying and deception—in short for being a politician.

IN THE LAKE OF THE WOODS CHAPTER 6 SUMMARY & ANALYSIS

          This chapter is structured as a collection of “evidence.” The first piece of evidence comes from Richard Thinbill, who says, “We called him Sorcerer.” The next pieces of evidence are related to John’s love for magic and magic tricks: a photograph of John as a child, holding a wand, a quote from Eleanor about how he used to practice magic for hours, and a list of childish tricks he owned as a child. Patricia Hood, Kathy’s sister, says that Kathy was sometimes scared of John.

          We ended the previous chapter by noting John’s propensity for deception. Here, O’Brien gives us evidence—a history, even—of his deception. This takes us back to his childhood, when he performed innocent tricks for his mother. Clearly, John’s love for magic as a child followed him for years afterwards—hence his nickname, and, it’s implied, the fear he inspires in Kathy.

Active Themes

          The narrator quotes other books, such as The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon, and academic texts on trauma and paranoia. The Pynchon passage describes how a woman who lives in a constant state of fear and paranoia eventually realizes that the fear is all in her mind. To alleviate the fear, she does a great number of things, including getting married. The academic sources describe how armed combat almost always leads to trauma. Talking about trauma means talking about the evil of human nature.

Pynchon (himself a notoriously deceptive, reclusive author) describes how women make peace with their own insecurity. Perhaps this explains why Kathy married John—despite John’s mysteriousness, marrying him was preferably to dealing with her problems on her own. The information about trauma establishes an important theme in the novel—human nature, and our capacity for evil.

          Eleanor says that John was always well behaved as a child. John’s service in the war had a big effect on his personality, she admits, but it’s “too easy” to say that the war made him who he is. Tony Carbo imagines that magic and politics were one and the same for John. Other sources, taken from the memoirs or biographies of American politicians like Lyndon B. Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, and Richard Nixon, describe how great politicians were motivated by boundless love—for their families, for their constituents—but also that their lives seemed to lack love.

          These quotes help to explain how John became the man he is, yet they also acknowledge the limitations of these kinds of explanations. No one thing can explain John—not his experiences in war and not his family situation. Nevertheless, it’s important to keep in mind that politicians like John are often influenced by their relationships with family members. We can acknowledge that John’s father played an important part in his development, so long as we don’t get carried away and treat his father as the “skeleton key” to understanding John. And further, we should recognize that many other characters do try to understand each other using these sorts of “skeleton keys,” which basically means that no one really understands each other.

          Ruth Rasmussen says that John threw away a perfectly good teakettle. Vincent Pearson, a part-time detective, insists that John “did something ugly,” but Arthur Lux, the sheriff, insists that Vincent is only a “theory man”—Arthur, who deals in facts, concludes that John’s case is “wide open.”

The mention of the teakettle is a god example of a “Chekhov’s Pistol”—a piece of information that seems ordinary, but which will clearly turn out to be important, by virtue of being mentioned at all. Lux’s comment about Vincent illustrates the tension between theory and fact. O’Brien will rely on both to reconstruct what happened to Kathy.

IN THE LAKE OF THE WOODS CHAPTER 7 SUMMARY & ANALYSIS

          As a child, John loved to perform magic tricks: silk scarves, a disappearing penny, etc. While these are only tricks, not real magic, John the child liked to pretend that the tricks are real. At fourteen, John’s father dies, and in his mind he performs magic tricks that restore his father to life.

This section suggests that John’s father indirectly influenced John’s entry into the world of politics. His death influenced John to perform more magic and, based on what Tony Carbo said in the previous chapter, John thus went on to view politics itself as a collection of magic tricks.

          John meets Kathy in 1966, when he’s a senior at the University of Minnesota, and Kathy is a freshman. John is desperate to make Kathy love him. He thinks of his father’s death, and worries to Kathy that things could go wrong between them. Shortly after they begin dating, John begins to spy on Kathy when she thinks she’s on her own. He learns that she smokes, and what she eats for breakfast. He thinks that he loves Kathy best when he’s spying on her, and the spying comes naturally to him. John knows that spying is wrong, but he blames Kathy for bringing the desire to spy out in him.

This section is structured to make us feel sympathetic to John, while also understanding the limits of that sympathy. Clearly, John’s love for Kathy is related to his acute sense of loss and guilt concerning his father. At the same time, this doesn’t absolve him of guilt for stalking Kathy—it’s petty and irresponsible and also kind of scary of him to blame Kathy for encouraging him to stalk her, anyway. There is an implication here that John views Kathy as an object whose only purpose is to love him.

          John continues spying on Kathy: he watched when she buys his birthday present, and when she buys her first diaphragm. Kathy says that it’s weird how well he knows her. Nevertheless, they plan to get married and live in Minneapolis. John plans to go to law school, then run for lieutenant governor of the state of Minnesota, followed by Senator. Kathy is impressed, but finds John’s plans cold and unfeeling. She asks John why he wants to go into politics, and he tells her that it’s because he loves Kathy. Even as he promises Kathy that he wants to use politics to do good, John knows that he’s lying. He knows that he enjoys politics because it involves manipulation and deception.

John is a manipulator and a liar who clearly enjoys the sense of exercising power over other people—hence his fondness for following the people he loves. It’s as if John thinks that loving others and watching them are synonymous. It’s revealing that Kathy seems to understand John perfectly well—-she recognizes, for instance, that he’s going into politics for himself, not for others—and yet continues to stay with John. Perhaps she sees some of herself in John, or perhaps her attraction to John is even more abstract, possibly even based on the fact that he is so hard to know.

          John graduates college in June of 1967, when the Vietnam war is in progress. In nine months, he is in active combat in Vietnam. His challenge during the war, he understands, is to stay sane. He sends letters to Kathy, and she writes him back. While most of their correspondence is cheery, Kathy worries that John is only fighting so that he’ll have an easier time getting elected. John is hurt, although he admits to himself that he sometimes fantasizes about being worshipped by crowds for his military sacrifices. He writes Kathy and tells her that he wishes she’d believe in him.

          We see a tension between appearances and essences. John wants to appear to be cheerful and happy, even though, we sense, he’s clearly witnessing awful things in Vietnam. Part of the sadness of this section is that John seems to be fooling himself as well as other people—he seems to believe, or at least half-believe, that he wants to go into politics to help other people. The desire to serve and the desire to control are always at odds in his head. It’s not just that other people don’t understand him. John doesn’t seem to understand himself (and there is also a broader implication: that people in general don’t totally understand themselves).

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          John isn’t a great soldier, but he’s popular among the other men. He does card tricks for them, which earn him the nickname, “Sorcerer.” Once, a soldier named Weber is fatally shot while John is with him. As Weber dies, he asks John to do his magic.

John sees the military as a kind of practice for being a politician. He seems to be performing a useful function for the other soldiers, even if he’s only doing so for his own selfish reasons—practice for his career later on.

          John’s magic eventually works its way into the military plans of his division, Charlie Company. The soldiers go through mock-rituals before they fight, in which John casts a spell to make them invisible, and tells their fortunes. They are impressed that John never gets injured, even when an explosive lands near him. John encourages this mystique. He writes to Kathy that he’s the company “witch doctor.” He also writes, “They actually believe in this shit.” Kathy warns him to be careful with his tricks—one day, she says, he’ll make her disappear.

John reveals himself to be a remarkably cynical and unfeeling man, one who has no respect for the people who like him. He hypocritically encourages the soldiers to worship him, then laughs at them for doing so. Kathy’s words obviously foreshadow the events of the coming chapters, when Kathy herself will disappear. Coming on the heels of O’Brien’s disturbing descriptions of John, this suggests that John is, or may be, responsible for Kathy’s disappearance.

          John worries that Kathy is growing distant. In a letter she sends him, she describes the fun she’s been having, and he wishes he could spy on her. Meanwhile, men in Charlie Company die, and there’s a general feeling that his magic has worn off. The soldiers aren’t warm to him anymore.

John’s relationship with Kathy parallels his relationship with the other men—it’s as if they all start to see through John at the same time.

          In February, an enemy sniper shoots a soldier named Reinhart; John is with Reinhart when he dies. John feels his body fill with anger, sadness, and evil. As if in a trance, he runs through the forest until he reaches the sniper, who he hits in the cheekbone with his gun. Later the soldiers praise John for finding the sniper so quickly. The soldiers perform their own act of magic: they raise the sniper high into the air with a rope, so that the Vietnamese villagers can see him.

This description of John’s behavior suggests that he’s not fully conscious of what he’s doing—it’s as if he, not the author, is the one repressing details of his experience. This is consistent with the definition of trauma. The section ends with a gruesome “act of magic”—the juxtaposition of magic, a seemingly innocent pursuit, and murder is far more disturbing than murder by itself could ever be.

          John returns to the United States in 1969. He calls Kathy, but hangs up before she can answer. During a layover between his flight home, he looks at himself in the mirror and addresses himself as Sorcerer. When he’s back in Minneapolis, he goes to the University of Minnesota and waits outside Kathy’s dormitory. He rehearses a speech about loyalty that he’ll deliver to Kathy later, but when he sees her, he notices that she seems quicker and cleverer. This makes him feel uneasy, and he goes to say in a hotel that night.

The scene in which John calls Kathy and then talks to himself in the mirror will appear later in the novel, in a different context. This is O’Brien’s way of illustrating that context and backstory are as important as the facts themselves—one can’t understand why John talks to himself in the mirror without understanding what he was doing previously. John’s love for Kathy seems to hinge upon his thinking that he can fool her—he treats her like a constituent, as if she’s practice for a life of politics. His uneasiness about Kathy’s increasing cleverness makes him uncomfortable, it is implied, because she might be able to see through his “tricks.”

          The night he sees Kathy, John sleeps in a hotel and thinks about his father’s funeral. He remembers wanting to hit everyone with a hammer, including his father. The next day, he returns to Kathy’s dormitory, but can’t resist spying on her as she goes to class and buys food. He feels suspicious that Kathy is seeing another man, but he also wants to forget his own suspicion. Still, he decides, he is the Sorcerer, and he has a gift for magic.

Again, John’s deception is rendered more poignant than it would otherwise be because John is clearly deceiving himself, too. He knows that it’s wrong to spy on other people, but his experiences in Vietnam have taught him to behave differently. It’s difficult to assign blame for John’s behavior—is he a product of his environment and his upbringing, or is he a free agent entirely responsible for his behavior?

          John watches as Kathy leaves her dorm and makes a phone call from a payphone. He waits outside her dormitory all night and into the morning. When Kathy returns and sees him there, she says that she was out, and John smiles and nods. In the end, they get married anyway.

It’s revealing that John marries Kathy even after he thinks that she’s having a relationship with someone else. Having this knowledge gives John power over Kathy, and it’s these two things—knowledge and power—that he’s always seemed to enjoy about their relationship. Why Kathy marries John is more mysterious, and in some ways why she is with John is as mysterious as her eventual disappearance.

          When John and Kathy get married, they promise to be true to one another, and move into an apartment in Minneapolis shortly thereafter. Kathy says it’s scary how much she loves him. John, or “Sorcerer,” as the narrator calls him, thinks to himself that he must guard his secrets, and never reveal the things he’s seen and done.

The chapter ends on a somewhat surprising note—even after John squeezes information from Kathy, he refuses to give up any information about himself. One can call John hypocritical for behaving this way, but one can also be sympathetic—clearly he’s seen things in Vietnam that he finds hard to deal with himself, let alone pass on to other people.

In the Lake of the Woods Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

          This chapter discusses John’s behavior on the night before he supposedly discovered that Kathy was missing. He wakes up in the night, twice. On the second occasion, he says, “Kill Jesus,” and goes to boil water for tea. He imagines tearing out “the bastard’s” eyes.

John’s behavior isn’t remotely comprehensible—we have no idea why he would say these things or behave this way. Still, based on the previous chapter, it seems likely that his behavior is related to his experiences in Vietnam in some way.

Active Themes

          John waits for the water to boil, and thinks about the primaries. He lost all but a few small cities. One minute, he thinks, he was presidential. The next, he was hated. John thinks that he has been betrayed; secrets have been betrayed. In the end, he lost by a margin of more than 100,000 votes. John interprets this loss as an end to his political career, and rues the “ambush politics” that made him lose the election.

John clearly sees himself as the victim—it’s left up to us to agree or disagree with him. Based on what we know about his hypocrisy and denial, we’re probably inclined to think that he’s being hypocritical here, even if we’ve yet to understand what information made John lose his campaign.

The water boils, and John, saying “Kill Jesus,” pours it over a geranium plant near the cottage’s fireplace. The plant dies almost instantly, and John laughs. He fills the kettle again with water for it to boil. He then walks to the bedroom, where Kathy is sleeping.

John is clearly capable of tremendous acts of destruction. Killing a plant seems almost childish and yet also psychotic, and perhaps this is meant to remind us that John’s behavior is at least partly the result of his experiences dealing with his father and his father’s death.

          In the days following Kathy’s disappearance, John will think of what he should have done that night. He should have woken Kathy up and apologized to her, telling her that he was taking his electoral defeat hard, and that he was fighting with memories of Vietnam. Instead, John remembers touching Kathy’s hair, pulling a blanket over her body, and returning to the living room.

John always prefers to hide information rather than reveal it. It’s seems like that this is why his behavior is erratic—instead of dealing with his experiences in Vietnam, he keeps them hidden or even repressed, which means that they can continue to influence his behavior.

          John later claims that he forgets what else he did that night. At one point, he remembers standing in the lake. At another time, he was near a dock. At some point he got back in bed. He had a nightmare about electric eels and boiling water. The next morning, he woke to find that Kathy wasn’t there. When he realized this, he rolled over and went back to sleep.

John’s nightmare is important, because it shows that, regardless of what John did, he has the potential to behave violently and destructively. We end with an image to which O’Brien will return again and again—John with his face buried in his pillow. This image can be shocking, poignant, hypocritical, etc.—it all depends on our perspective, as we’ll come to see. And it is also an image that captures the idea of John hiding from things, repressing things.

In the Lake of the Woods Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

The chapter is structured around another hypothesis for Kathy’s disappearance: Kathy heard John walking around in the night and got scared. Thus, she left the cottage. She might have heard John saying “Kill Jesus,” or seen the plant he destroyed. She might have then left the house in her nightgown.

In the early chapters of the novel, Kathy seems like the innocent victim of John’s hypocrisy and deception. Here is no exception—she doesn’t know how to deal with John, because John keeps his feelings about Vietnam bottled up. Thus, she runs away.

Staring into the cottage from outside, Kathy might have seen John, yelling and laughing and looking completely unlike the man she thought she knew. Perhaps she contemplated going to the Rasmussen cottage a mile away to find a doctor and calm John down, but then decided to wait. John needed love right now, she must have thought—but the love she had given him in their marriage never seemed to satisfy him.

Despite being married to John for years, Kathy doesn’t fully know him. Nevertheless, she feels great love for him—a love we have yet to fully understand. We get the sense that John and Kathy’s love is asymmetrical—Kathy gives more to John than John gives back to her.

Active Themes

Kathy might have thought about everything that had happened to John lately. In August and September, the newspapers broke new information about John, information that made his audiences hate him and yell at him. When Kathy asked him if the information was true, John only replied that it happened a long time ago, and challenged Kathy about her dentist; he asked Kathy if he was right, and she nodded. Shortly after this incident, John gave a concession speech, and Kathy was amazed by how easily he pretended to be gracious and cheerful.

Kathy has a keen eye for John’s hypocrisy and political talent—she sees how easily he moves between tense confrontation and glib speeches. And yet as Kathy challenges John about his secrets, John shows that Kathy too has secrets, which it seems likely involves an affair with a dentist.

          As Kathy watched her husband that night near Lake of the Woods, she might have gone inside and seen the plants John killed. At this, she may have left—or, the narrator admits, maybe not. Maybe she walked into the bedroom, where she smelled wet wool and saw John pouring boiling water on the bed. After this, she might have concluded that her husband was beyond all help, and always had been, and then grabbed a sweater and run to the Rasmussen place. From here, she might have hurt herself or made a wrong turn. She might have gotten lost, the narrator admits, and she may still be out there.

In this scenario, John is responsible for Kathy’s disappearance, even if he didn’t directly hurt her or drag her from the cottage. Kathy finally sees that John is “beyond help”—even though she’s been trying in vain to help him for years and years. Kathy’s epiphany at this moment is undercut by the qualification that this is—as in the other “Hypothesis” chapters—only one possible scenario. We have no idea what actually happened to Kathy that night.

In the Lake of the Woods Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

 “One evening,” while John is still in the midst of his political career, John and Kathy are at a political party. At this point, they have been married for almost seven years, and are still very much in love. John gets drunk, drives home with Kathy, and makes love to her. Afterwards, they return to the party, where John makes a speech and does magic tricks.

John continues to show some signs of alcoholism. This is disturbing, since alcoholism played such a major role in his traumatic experiences with his father. In this scene, however, John seems perfectly in control of himself—he can glibly move between sex, drink, and charismatic political campaigning.

John went to Vietnam because of love, not because he wanted to be a good citizen or a hero. He imagines his father praising him for fighting. He thinks to himself that he sometimes does bad things to gain other people’s love, and that he hates himself for needing to be loved.

The information we learn here contradicts what we’ve heard earlier—is John going to Vietnam out of love, or out of political ambition? We sense that both hypotheses are partly correct—John seems to want to help others while also caring about his political career.

          In college, John and Kathy often go to a bar called The Bottle Top. One night, John dares Kathy to steal a bottle of Scotch from the bar. Kathy talks the bartender into going into a back room, then takes a long time choosing which bottle to steal, and then takes it back to where they’re sitting. This makes John love Kathy, and he says that they should get married. He looks into her eyes, and thinks that they have a light that could only belong to her.

When they’re young, John and Kathy can bond over their deception of other people. Kathy, in this moment, clearly relishes the thrill of deception the same way John does. The image of Kathy’s eyes, another important one in the novel, will reappear many times, each time suggesting something slightly different. This is indicative of the way the entire novel works—the same object or fact can point to multiple, mutually contradictory conclusions at the same time.

          Before John and Kathy can marry, John fights in Vietnam. He sends Kathy letters in which he talks about love, but not the deaths he’s seen. He compares their love to a pair of snakes he saw in Vietnam. Each was eating each other’s tail, until their heads almost touch and a soldier ended their lives by chopping them with a machete. He also mentions that the other soldiers call him Sorcerer, a nickname he enjoys.

John adopts a clear “persona” in this letter—the macho, intimidating soldier (the analogy of love being like two snakes seems designed to make Kathy feel a little uncomfortable). The image of two snakes eating each other suggests that love and war are often difficult to distinguish—this is clear if we look at John and Kathy’s relationship: it’s often hard to tell if they love or hate each other. And there is a sense that they are destroying each other through the intensity of their relationship.

          As a child of nine or ten, John would lie in bed, surrounded by catalogs of magic tricks, making note of all the prices. The next day, he would travel alone by bus to a magic shop. There, he would try to work up the nerve to go inside. When he walked inside, a women with red hair would call, “You!”, and he would rush back outside and return home. At home, John would talk to his father. His father would ask him to watch a baseball game tomorrow, and John would say, “maybe.” In response, his father would say, “Maybe’s good enough for me.”

In contrast to his slick, glib manner as an adult, John seems shy and uncomfortable as a child, avoiding the ginger-haired woman. He also seems to be the one responsible for alienating his father, not the other way around. His father, by contrast, seems like a saint—a kind, loving father who respects his children enough to give them their own choices

          One day in Vietnam, John senses, “Something was wrong.” He’s surrounded by gunfire and dead women. He sees dead animals and burning villages, and thinks that he doesn’t know where to shoot. He shoots at smoke and trees, and his only desire is to make what he sees go away. PFC Weatherby greets him as Sorcerer, and starts to smile. In response, Sorcerer shoots him.

John’s behavior in Vietnam becomes a little clearer—he’s clearly hiding the fact that he killed a soldier knowingly—but the circumstances of that event are far from completely explained at this point. Why John shot a fellow soldier remains to be seen.

          Back in Minnesota, John is elected to the State Senate. He celebrates by hosting a small party, and getting a hotel suite with Kathy. In the suite, he and Kathy sing “My Way” by Frank Sinatra, and make love.

The juxtaposition of murder and political success sends a clear message—there’s something disturbing about politics, something that attracts liars and hypocrites like John. The use of Sinatra (who sings about “bad mistakes,” of which he’s “made a few”) is unnerving.

          The narrator returns to describing John’s experiences in Vietnam. One evening, Charlie Company approaches a small village. The company is attacked by mortar fire, but no one is hurt. Afterwards, Sorcerer helps round up every villager, takes them back to the company, and performs a magic show. He performs card tricks, and turns a pear into an orange. He also makes the village disappear—a trick which, the narrator notes, involves artillery and white phosphorus. Everyone who watches the show finds the vanishing village “trick” spectacular.

It’s telling that John is called Sorcerer in this section—his identity in Vietnam is brand new, based on performance and appearances. The sinister side of magic is very obvious in this section. At first, we think that Sorcerer is doing the Vietnamese a favor. Then, we sense that the big “magic trick” he accomplished involved blowing up the Vietnamese village. This suggests that John’s magic is far from harmless—he uses it to do actual damage to other people.

          As a child, John practices magic tricks in front of the mirror. He thinks that he can use magic to read his father’s mind. While looking in the mirror, he imagines his father thinking that he loves John. In general, John thinks, the mirror makes everything better. In the mirror, John’s father always smiles, and John doesn’t have to think about empty vodka bottles. John’s father drinks in the garage, always promising John that he’ll smash his bottles after he has one more drink.

It’s no coincidence that John spends so much time in front of a mirror. Looking in the mirror, John is both lost in his own thoughts and at the same time performing for himself. This fits with what we know already about how John lies not just to others but also to himself. In contrast to earlier in the chapter, John’s father’s behavior in this section is disturbing—he hardly seems like a good father, and the fact that John has to imagine his love suggests that he doesn’t love John much, or at least doesn’t or isn’t able to show it.

          John’s father is a popular, charming man. The other boys in the neighborhood love to play football with him and listen to his stories and jokes. In school, John’s classmate, Tommy Winn makes a speech about how much he likes John’s father, and gives John a sad look that seems to say, “I wish he was my father.” At the time, John thinks that Tommy doesn’t know about his father’s drunkenness, or about how his father made fun of John when he got fat in the fourth grade, calling him “Jiggling John.” John’s mother insisted that John was only getting a little husky, but his father insisted that this wasn’t true, and criticized John for doing magic like a “pansy,” instead of playing sports.

We begin to see where John gets his fondness for deception and lying. His father is equally adept at hiding his demons from other people—indeed, he puts on an image of respectability and likability in front of other people. Worse, he abuses John verbally and encourages John to hate himself and his body. It’s hard to hate John when we learn that he’s the victim of an abusive father. His fondness for deception and nicknames seems to stem from someone else’s bullying, rather than his own decisions.

          As an adult, before he’s found political success, John goes on walks with Kathy and discusses buying a house. Kathy wants to buy a blue Victorian-style house she’s seen, but understands that she and John don’t have the money for it. She dares John, jokingly, to rob a bank.

John and Kathy are only joking with each other, but it’s hard not to see something sinister in their conversation, given what we know about John’s propensity for lying and wrongdoing.

Active Themes

Sorcerer, the narrator says, thought he would get away with murder. Shooting PFC Weatherby was an accident, just a reflex, Sorcerer thinks. He tricks himself into believing that he hadn’t killed Weatherby, and tells himself that he loved Weatherby the way he would love an animal. He and the other soldiers blame the Vietcong for Weatherby’s death.

It’s hard to tell which parts of this to believe and which parts to take with a grain of salt. Was the murder really just a “reflex,” or is John only telling himself this because he doesn’t want to think of himself as a murderer? It’s difficult to answer these kinds of questions, because the narrator doesn’t offer his own opinion. It’s also revealing that John compares Weatherby to an animal—it’s as if, even in his fantasies of love, John isn’t capable of normal, human-to-human love. Whether this is because of his father or his own choices is left unclear.

          In 1982, John Wade is elected lieutenant governor of Minnesota. He is 37 at the time. At the time, he and Kathy have begun arguing, but he’s proud to stand next to Kathy and take the oath of office. He plans to buy Kathy a blue Victorian house. After being inaugurated, he and Kathy dance with each other. John thinks that Kathy’s eyes are “only her eyes.”

At this stage, John is uncertain about his own worth as a person, his future, and his relationship with Kathy. O’Brien shows this with wordplay—John’s thoughts about Kathy’s eyes could be taken as a statement about her unique beauty, or her diminished worth to him.

          At the age of eleven, John and his father drive to Karra’s Studio of Magic to buy John’s Christmas present. John notes that the store hasn’t changed since he was younger, and sheepishly walks inside. The red-haired woman still yells, “You!” at him. She and John’s father laugh with each other and talk like old friends.

John seems to group his father with strange, unfriendly people—thus, it seems to him that his father and the woman are friends.

          At the magic shop, John chooses a magic trick called the “Guillotine of Death,” which is heavy and almost two feet high. The red-haired woman says that the Guillotine is her favorite trick. She demonstrates that there is a sharp blade on the Guillotine, and tells John’s father to put his arm under it. John’s father is reluctant to do so, but John urges him to, saying that he knows how to do the trick. The red-haired lady tells John, “Let him have it.”

John’s behavior in this section suggests that he uses magic as a way of fighting back against his father’s verbal abuse and bullying—it’s a way for him to make his father feel inferior and frightened, just as his father makes him feel this way. It’s easy to imagine this sense of resentment turning into guilt after his father dies.

          As an adult, John thinks that he wants to crawl inside Kathy’s belly. He’s afraid of losing her, and spies on her, following her to the drug store and the post office. As he watches her run errands, he thinks that he loves her eyes so much that he wants to suck them from their sockets. Later, Kathy tells John that she feels as if he’s worming inside her, a suggestion that John doesn’t deny. He tells Kathy that they must be like snakes gobbling each other up.

John’s sense of love for Kathy takes on disturbing qualities in this section—it seems almost grotesque, as if he wants to own Kathy, treating her like an object instead of like a human being. It’s unclear how much of this is John’s “sincere” love for Kathy, and how much of it is carefully calculated to make Kathy feel uneasy—the mention of snakes seems closer to the latter than the former.

          In Vietnam, the narrator says, Sorcerer is in his element. Vietnam is a place with tunnels, trap doors, monsters, and magic. There is no way of telling where the Vietcong are, or what the villagers are thinking. Secrecy, Sorcerer thinks, is key in Vietnam. Sorcerer’s own secrets include shooting PFC Weatherby, and the fact that he loves Vietnam. The biggest secret of all is about a place called Thuan Yen.

This information about Sorcerer and Vietnam contradicts what we’ve read so far. Evidently, Sorcerer / John isn’t in his element in Vietnam, since he feels that “something is wrong.” In this section, the implication is that Sorcerer is adapting to his surroundings—taking on a new name and a new identity to deal with the horrors he sees there—horrors that he alludes to at the end of this section.

          John knows that he is sick. He tries to tell Kathy about his sickness. As they prepare dinner, he says that he’s afraid to look at himself in the mirror. Without ceasing to chop onions, Kathy tells him that she loves to look at him. John insists that he has to tell Kathy something important, but Kathy says, “It doesn’t matter.” She says, “We’ll be fine.” As John and Kathy look at each other, the narrator says, anything could have happened.

John is a sympathetic figure here—he’s clearly trying to find the words to explain himself to Kathy, but Kathy seems uninterested or indifferent to his feelings, unwilling to dig deeper. The narrator’s comment that “anything could have happened” is an apt way to talk about Kathy’s disappearance.

          John doesn’t tell anyone about killing PFC Weatherby. However, he sometimes thinks he sees PFC Weatherby waving and smiling at him.

Even as Sorcerer—a persona designed to make John avoid a sense of guilt—John still feels guilty for killing Weatherby.

          When John’s father died, John was a teenager. The day he was buried, John performed magic in front of the mirror. He tells his father that he wasn’t fat, but normal.

Clearly, magic—and more generally, fantasy and deception—are ways for John to avoid guilt and shame and fight back against his father’s abuse.

          After John returns from Vietnam, Kathy doesn’t insist that John talk to a psychiatrist. At times, though, John yells out in his sleep, and Kathy says that he’s speaking in a voice she’s never heard. Later in the night, Sorcerer would stare at Kathy, and call her, “My Kath.” As he stares at her, Sorcerer pictures Weatherby, and his father’s coffin. He imagines two snakes eating each other, and dreams of the possibility that they eat all of each other, so that nothing—including his memories of Vietnam—will be left behind.

Here, the image of the two snakes eating each other broadens in its significance. It represents John’s disturbing idea of love, but also his fantasy of innocence. He wants to forget his actions in Vietnam (whatever they are—we don’t entirely know what he did yet). With this in mind, he wants to “balance out” his sins with something—it could be politics, marriage, or more deception. In any case, the goal is to forget, to repress the trauma of war, to make it disappear the way the two snakes eating each other—a symbol of violence and love combined—ultimately would cease to exist.