In the Lake of the Woods: Chapter 23 Summary & Analysis

Coming on the heels of a long chapter about Kathy and her optimism, John’s behavior in this chapter mirrors that of his wife. Perhaps John is beginning to heal, instead of continuing to attempt to forget.

Claude, like Tony, is a realist, and doesn’t mitigate the truth when the truth is less than inspiring. It’s Pat, not John, who points to their starting place; she seems more energetic than John during the search, a fact which annoys her.

John seems hopeless in this scene—instead of imagining himself reuniting with Kathy, he thinks about the remains of her body. This is a surprising reaction, especially after the signs of optimism he showed only hours ago.

For all the cynicism he shows, John is at least thinking about his time in Vietnam instead of repressing it. It would seem that Pat is unfair to criticize John for daydreaming: he’s thinking about events Pat can barely comprehend, after all. The distance between John and Pat—indeed, between John and nearly everyone in his life—is obvious when John apologizes to Pat. Instead of trying to understand what Pat is thinking, he just issues a blanket apology. In doing so he isn’t really communicating, he’s ducking blame.

O’Brien keeps dancing around John’s relationship with Pat, without ever explaining what it is. The closest he comes to explaining their antipathy is here, when it’s revealed that John is obviously attracted to Pat. Whether this explains Pat’s dislike for him or not is left unexplained—we could even take John’s attraction to Pat as a form of love for Kathy (it’s been mentioned that Pat looks a lot like her sister).

We hear, again and again, that John’s intentions in deceiving others have always been virtuous. It’s impossible to know how to take this sentiment. At times, John acknowledges that he’s deceiving because he likes to deceive; at other times, he thinks that he’s acting out of love for others. It would be a mistake to take either one of these explanations as “true” and the other as “false”—there’s some truth in both of them. What’s clear is that John’s deceptions have an impact, regardless of their motivations.

John is still thinking that everyone is suspicious of him; thus, he’s reluctant to talk to other people—they could be potential enemies. At the same time, he’s thinking about Vietnam more than he has in the last decade; somehow, the events of the week have triggered old memories of the war.

John’s exchange with Vincent is strange, and more than a little humorous. He’s no longer trying to be a politician—instead, he’s quite willing to fight back, which is what makes his barb about Vincent being “albino” so unexpected and amusing. One thing to take from this scene is that everyone has “issues”—Vincent clearly has a story to tell about his Swedish background, for instance—even if John has darker secrets than most.

One can take John’s indifference to the conversation as indifference to Kathy’s disappearance, or anger and frustration (and tiredness) with his situation, including but not limited to Kathy’s disappearance. In any case, he’s begun to despair, and seems to believe that he’ll never see Kathy again.

Even for John to consider explaining some of his secrets voluntarily is a major step forward for him. At the same time, it’s notable that he may be thinking of telling these secrets because he knows Lux and Pat suspect him of being involved in Kathy’s disappearance. It’s also important that, in the end, he doesn’t say anything to them.

There’s a sudden “jump” forward in the narrative in this section. We’ve been so focused on the day-to-day interactions between John and the detectives that it’s a little surprising to see O’Brien leaping forward by half a month. The section feels like a kind of “summation: of everything we’ve been reading so far. For instance, O’Brien makes explicit what he’s been suggesting all along: the lake is a symbol of deception and uncertainty (and not a bad symbol of the book itself!).

It’s unclear to us why John is asking for Claude’s boat; this means that it’s also unclear why Claude refuses to give it to him. Perhaps he doesn’t trust John; perhaps he’s worried that John is going to kill himself; perhaps he thinks John is going to flee since he’s guilty of murder. Pat seems to believe the third option.

The links between magic and the events of the novel are becoming more explicit. Here, for instance, O’Brien tells us that John’s father’s death was a magic trick—something we’ve had in the back of our heads for a while. One new suggestion in this section, however, is that magic can terrify as well as entertain. The casual transportation John mentions could be his own suicide.

It seems as if John is committing suicide in this scene. We can take what he experiences in the water as a kind of epiphany, or even a symbolic “baptism” in which he’s born again. John’s love for Kathy seems to save him from depression—he’s accepted that he’s no different than his father, and thus a suicide case. Then, he thinks about Kathy, and apparently decides that he wants to live. The qualifiers, “apparently” and “seems” are necessary here, because O’Brien doesn’t give us perfect information about what John is thinking.

In this section, at least two important things happen. First, it becomes clear that Lux has broadened his search to a place that includes more direct suspicion of John—his mention of “other places” to look suggests that he’s going to search John’s own property, or the cottage where he’s staying. Second, John recognizes what we’ve recognized long ago—he’s become his father. To recognize this may mean that John can change—and perhaps become a better person.

In a chapter full of sudden changes, this may be the most sudden. Claude, always an ambiguous character, is revealed to be something of a friend to John—he’s helping John by telling him about what’s in store for him.

We’ve been given hints that Claude and John are two versions of the same person, but it isn’t until now that we see how deeply the two men understand one another. All along, Claude has understood John’s apparent indifference to his wife’s disappearance—he knows that people behave abnormally in abnormal situations. It’s not clear how much help he’ll give John in the end—even though he refuses to give him a boat, he seems to accept that John’s going to get one anyway.

We’re coming “full circle”—for the second time in the novel, John is buying things in the Mini-Mart. Whether he’s changed at all since the last time he was there is left up to us to decide. In John’s mind, he’s restraining himself from showing his anger to Myra for making his argument with Kathy early in the novel seem more important than it was. He thinks he’s acting as well as could be expected towards her. Yet later it will be shown that Myra’s perspective of his behavior here is very different from his.

The subject of John’s dream seems to symbolize something, but it’s not apparent what it’s a symbol of. Perhaps the enormous computer is a symbol of inevitability—a testament to the fact that John has always been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He shipped off to Vietnam at a time when ordinary people were being forced to do barbaric things, and he had the misfortune to be born to a drunken, suicidal father. Claude seems to see John’s life in these terms, and it would appear that John sees his life this way, too. John sees the cottage as the place where Kathy and he became those snakes: loving and destroying each other until they both ceased to exist. But, as should be no surprise for this book by now, there are multiple ways to cease to exist: there’s death, and there’s willfully disappearing to become someone else.